Personal jokes (possibly lost in translation)

The longer we go without power, washing and contact with the outside world, the more ridiculous we behave. Our lack of decorum has escalated several times into chaotic but highly creative collaborative experiments. The most hilarious being, our attempt one night to create an interpretive contemporary dance pieces using the generator as a sound score and a torch and a candle as our lighting. It was hours of entertainment!

The masterpiece of our playful interventions, however, started early one evening when we realised that not only did we have no power or water, but also no working phone/email and no car. So, should there be an emergency, we were stuffed. Necessary caution, however, was abandoned when we decided we would entertain ourselves with night walk through the grounds and a boat ride on the pond to look at stars. After stumbling around in the moonlight we got the row boat into the water but could only find one canoe paddle - that'll do. So in we climbed.

"There's a 'ole in the boat" one of the french women cried.
"No no. its just a little water from the storm".
"No its a 'ole, the water is coming in."
"No no its fine, I'll scoop it out".

This went on for several minutes till someone with a flash light located a hole the size of an iceberg gash. Shrieking, scrambling and in a tangle of arms and legs we grabbed at each other and the undulating pontoon trying to get out of a leaking boat.

Later that night after we had taken it in turns to stargaze in the canoe, the exhilaration of night-wandering, universe gazing and a near drowning left some of us too wound up to sleep. I began the mindless gesture of cleaning the kitchen but just a few hours later 3 of us had turned the kitchen into one large practical joke.

Here are the things we made and in brackets a translation.

Emergency Phone

(hopefully no explanation required)

Communal Cutlery and Crockery.
 Also a smal post-it note pad for big important ideas.
(We had tried to set rules to manage the mayhem, such as, each person has 1 cup and 1 glass with a sticker on it so it can be reused without washing it)

Fire Alarm arangement

The night of the storm all of the 8 fire alarms went off. Instead of the normal high pitched beeping these ones actually yell "Fire. Fire. Fire" at you. Due to our no power situation we were ironically running around in the dark holding candles up to the alarms to turn them off. Then we had to rip the alarms out of the wall after we found out they were wired in. But they didn't shut up, so we pulled out the batteries and then they just kept on beeping. Finally, in desperation we wrapped them in a towel and shut them in a cupboard.

Turning water into wine

New cup for Sylvie and Mirelle

Environmental protest

I wanted to see this bench clean just once.

(Since we the storm the kitchen table and bench had been occupied by towering piles of paper plates (used and clean) bags of corn bread, apples and warmed chocolate, cameras, insect repellent and redundant phones and phone charges, cereal, napkins notes and candle stubs - it was feral)

We also made sculptures out of stuff found during the clean up. This one uses a Tupperware container, stale bread and paper and reminded us of some work we had seen in a Sculpture magazine. 

The next morning I woke to the sound of the house laughing.