I’ve started to get calls from newspaper reporters and even a few TV shows. They want to know where Gen is, and I don’t even know what state the camp she went to is in… What do you think I should do?

Okay guys, it’s Kristin writing again. I’ve got some more posts to put up, but I feel kind of weird about posting them. Because Gen is missing.

I mean, I think she’s missing. The last I heard she and a bunch of the kids from camp were heading to the electricity shack for a little party, and then I never heard from her again. It’s been awhile.

I’m wondering if she got caught having a phone at the camp? But if she did, I know her parents would at least let her send me a text letting me know that she was okay.

She’s been saying she thinks Nora has it in for her. What if something happened between them? And Ron and Betsy––what if Ka really was onto something and they really are cult leaders or identity thieves or something like that?

Don’t you think it’s weird that she’s disappeared right after finding out that all the 1890 stuff is a sham?

I’m back! Can you believe that I found a place to charge the battery on my phone? Well, I did. Want to know where it was? This is the biggest piece of news I’ve had to tell anyone in a long time!

Okay, so... Nora? The poster child for Camp Frontier? You won’t believe what I found her doing.

She was typing.

At a computer.

In a special secret electricity shack Ron and Betsy have set up and don’t want anyone to know about.

Nora isn’t supposed to use the shack, but she sneaks into it every night when Ron and Betsy think she’s out walking in the woods or whatever. Nora and Caleb have been meeting at the electricity shack in secret since the camp began. They’ve been listening to everyone’s iPods. They’ve been drinking the Diet Coke that Betsy stores in a mini-fridge.

Nora explained that the shack is just to let her dad check out organic farming chat rooms, but I don’t know. . . Is Ka right? Are Ron and Betsy a front for some elaborate crime ring? Is more going on here than it would seem?

That would be AWESOME.

I can’t wait to tell Ka.

Another meeting yesterday. Caleb was there... Can’t write now. I’ve been so careful about saving the phone battery while I’ve been here, but now it is about to die...

Ka snuck out last night and came over after dinner. We spent an hour coming up with ideas for Ron and Betsy’s former lives. I’m not going to write them all because there are too many and I’m worried about my battery dying on me.

But okay, here’s one. This was maybe the best. Grizzly Bear Wrestlers in Circus Side Show.

This one’s pretty good too: Identity thieves (they’re off the grid because they’re on the lam).

Yoga instructors who had to leave the business because Ron’s so stiff he couldn’t touch his toes.

Spies in a forgotten sleeper cell left over from the Cold War.

Cult leaders who are pretending this is just a summer camp but really are jumpstarting a commune––just wait until the fall when none of us gets to go home!

Okay, I’ll stop.

My mom made butter last week, which was awesome, but here’s what’s not awesome: making butter is now my job.

Here’s what you need to do to make butter. After you get a bucket of milk, you let it sit on the counter for a day. Before long, some stuff starts to collect on the top—a skin—and then if you leave it, it gets thicker. That’s how you get cream. I know, totally foul, but you spoon that into this big wooden bucket with a paddle in it called a butter churn.

Then you sit there using the paddle to mix up the cream stuff until your arm feels like it’s about to fall off. You lift the lid on the churn, check to see if you’ve got butter, and see that no, it’s not even close. So then you get really depressed. Being depressed is an enormously important part of the process; you can almost tell how thick the butter is just by how defeated and miserable you feel personally.

But you keep stirring it some more anyway. It takes about five hundred million years before the stuff in the churn turns to butter, and by the time it has your arms are trembling, you have blisters on your hands, you hate your mom, and you promise that, to make it last longer, you will hardly eat any of this butter yourself. But it’s so good, that’s kind of a hard promise to keep, especially when everyone else is slathering it on everything like it’s free.

I Can’t Believe (I know how to make) Butter!

Making butter is the stupidest waste of time in the world, considering you can go buy butter in any grocery store in the world any day you want. But stupid or no, I know how to do it and in fact I’m getting kind of good.

In theory, doing laundry doesn’t sound that bad. You heat up lots of water, add soap, soak the clothes, scrub them, wring out the dirty water, soak them again, scrub them again, wring out the dirty water––again––soak them, rinse them, wring out the water, rinse them a third time, and then wring out the water once more time before hanging them out to dry. Sounds easy, right?

No.
It’s not easy.
Doing laundry is a nightmare.

Here’s the main problem with laundry (if you really want to know, and trust me, you don’t)––Everything starts off about ten times dirtier than normal laundry at home. I mean, the white shirts, the bibs and petticoats––they were brown. And on top of that, washing them doesn’t really help because the water you’re washing them becomes instantly filthy. By the end of the day, you’re hoping to get things to a place where they’re maybe as dirty as the stuff you would put in the hamper at home.

By lunchtime on laundry day, every pot we had was filled with hot water. There was a washtub on the floor overflowing with suds. My mom had got out this thing called a washboard which is made of wood covered in wrinkled tin and looks like something you’d use as a musical instrument in elementary school, but is actually something you’re supposed to use to scrub out the dirt from clothes––you rub them up and down on the board, and then wring them out, soak them in the water and do it again.

There were puddles of spilled water on the floor. Our hands were red and chapped. My mom had sweat pouring down her temples––God knows I could feel it dripping down my face too. The muscles in my upper arms were burning and so weak from trying to ring out these enormously heavy shirts and petticoats that I could barely get them to move.

I think I got more skin to rub off my knuckles than dirt to rub out of the clothes.

Last Sunday, when my mom said we had to get the laundry done this week and I had asked, “Do we take it to Betsy’s?” she laughed so hard I was worried they’d have to call some men in a van to take her away. Now I understand what she meant.

I was so tired last night I fell asleep sitting up on the porch.