28 July 2008

Camp, Day 1

Well, to finish up Sunday. Yesterday Casey and I drove all the way across the state to go to Youth Camp. This is an awesome program for the kids of our workers. It's a great time and the kids have friends for life.

The drive, however, takes forever. Normally this sucks, but Casey and I talked and laughed and contemplated life the whole way so the drive didn't seem to take as long. We came up with some great ideas for work, which I have to try to remember now – and I'm struggling to do that. I know they were great ideas, as Casey's and my ideas always are, but I'll have to work on this during the week.

Training kind of sucked, but whatever. Then we went out as a group (of volunteers, counselors and staff) for pizza. Some of the Vs, Cs and Ss had brought their kids along already so they came too. What wasn't fun was that there were so many of them. That's my one beef. I know they need to get to camp too, but it doesn't start until Monday and we have a busing system. Why can't they ride the bus too?

Anyway, we ended up having 17 pizzas and one kid ate about 1 and a half of that. Sad, really. The rest of the night was putting things together for the camp and relaxing a bit.

Today the morning was really boring. We had oodles of time, it seemed. Not sure why we need to come Sunday afternoon for training when we could easily do it Monday AM, but whatever. I'm sure it's just a case of “we've always done it that way.”

But this afternoon – wow! Kids came out of the woodwork it seemed. DJ and I worked on the ID cards for the kids and we had the system licked. It was great. Nikki helped us to organize the cards to hand out later and kept the kids away from DJ so he could breathe. Hahaha. Eventually he left, the whole group got together to talk about the week and so Nikki and I had to take a break from finishing the ID cards. I met my helper, Jasper, who is super cool and had no qualms about stepping aside so she could take pictures.

The latter there is a great blessing. Nothing against my help last year, but I really feel comfortable with Jasper that she can take charge and get what we need. So Nikki and I went to finish up the ID cards. We got them all completed but by the time we got to dinner that night they had finished serving so we took a detour and headed into the little town to get some food. That was a nice respite.

We got back in time for the campfire. That was fun. I hung out with Ryan, one of our on site medics, who is pretty cool. We were lamenting all the sugar the kids were eating (marshmallows, cookies, chocolate). Scary, really. I am really glad that I'm in the adult cabin and don't have to deal with the kids.

Luckily I was smart enough to sit down wind of the fire so I don't smell too bad tonight. I'm exhausted though and tomorrow will be another long day.

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