Time Marches On

So my original plan of actually detailing all my time here failed. I just don't have to the time and theres too much to explain. Plus I reached a point where I was so behind that my memory just wasn't that clear. So my new plan for the rest of the time I am here is to just talk about whatever just happened even if I skip stuff. At the same time I will go off on tangents about certain things.


As of right now we are about 5 days into the third 2-week session and the second 4-week session. We just had session break which is generally speaking the halfway point. Things are rollin'. I had my evaluation yesterday. It sounds like there are going to keep me around. Some good feedback on stuff to push myself on. It was long, both myself and my boss are talkers so we talked a lot though. It was good, I got a chance to verbalize some of the things I've been doing and thinking which is sometimes hard here. But let us not dwell on that, because that was yesterday and thats not how I roll anymore.


Today was a special day. Some backround on special days first then. Special days around to serve two purposes. One is to mix things up from the regular schedule. However the much more significant reason is that we do them when we have days off. The way it works is that half the staff are off at once. So special days are days designed to be run half staff. You just can't do regular activities half staff. That doesn't mean they are less fun, but it does mean that they are more work for the staff that is there, usually. One thing that is interesting about a special day as opposed to a regular day is how big the quality range is. In a normal day of camp (assuming it doesn't rain) the difference between a bad day and a good day from a programming admistrative perspective is small. Maybe Riflery was not quite as fun today, but everything else was fine. Maybe lunch ran too long or something. In the end most individual regular days are very similar. This is not the case with special days. Special days can be amazing or awful. The are often the highlights and lowlights of a campers entire session. I remember my first summer, back then there were 6 special days per 4-week session, it is now 4. This is in great part because that campers complained en masse that there were too many. This is partially related to the number but also to the consumate crappiness of special days that year. In retrospect (I lacked the experience to full appreciate this at the time, though even then I somewhat knew) they were poorly concieved, run, and plan. In general it seemed like the goal of special days was mearly to get through them rather for them to be particularly enjoyable.


Since then there has been 4 which has had time off related implications (I am planning on going into detail about time off at a later post). Some used to change every year but over the past two years CL is trying to keep the same ones each year. They are:


Carnival Day: It can be tweeked each time but the general concept is that we mix carnival type games (some of which we rent and others we just do ourselves) with some small carnival attractions we rent: Big blow up slide, inflatable jousting, bungee run, dunk tank, cotton candy and snow cone machines and sometimes some others.


Rally Day: We do some sort of division activity in the morning and then in the afternoon the girl camp comes over and we play some games with our 'sister' cabins, eat dinner and have a dance.


The Great Escape: Basically a camp field trip. Different cabins go do different places in Minnesota. Has ranged from water parks, to a baseball game, a forest history center, aquarium/boat trip, and other stuff.


Color Wars: A tradition around many camps in the country. It was done a long time ago at Lincoln and then stopped. It was brought back 7ish years ago. There are two colors, red and blue. Once you are on a team you are that team forever along with any brothers, fathers, or sons. I am on the red team.




Today was Carnival Day. CD is possibly my favorite special day primarly for one reason. Most of the day is 'free roaming' meaning the campers don't have to go do a specific thing at a time. They can choose how to spend their time as long as they stay in the correct general area. The day started with me waking up at 650am to go sit by a fire. This is part of the once a sessin tradition of 'firewatch' at camp. The general idea is that each cabin takes turns watching and maintaining a large fire in a fire pit which heats up rocks below. There is a campfire/ceremony beforehand and then from about 1000pm to 730am someone is at the fire. The admin team always has the last shift so we were at 655am. I sat by the fire for 30 minutes and then went to set up for the morning.




We did something a little different this time. We often have a "lazy breakfast" on these days where campers can got to breakfast anytime they want from 815-845. The idea is they can sleep in a little. The one problem with this is that it is also the campers favorite breakfast; donuts, bacon, and many other nice things. So many of the younger campers especially will get there too early which isn't the idea. This time we pushed it back to 830-930am so campers could sleep in more and told them they couldn't come before 830am. I had a quick breakfast then went back to work. It started raining a lot which was worriesome and set me back from setting up. As it was Sunday at 1000am we had camp church. I didn't go to church (normally I would) because due to the rain I was behind on set up and I had the best handle on what needed to be done.




We got started with the morning portion of the activities around 1100am. It was a little later then I would have liked to had started but it was the earliest we could. Our catholic campers have the option (or I should say their parents have the option of sending them) of going to catholic mass in town. Normally they have to wake up early and go so they are back in time for activities. Today though because we were doing the lazy breakfast they went to the second mass which did not get them back until 11. While Wig explained to the campers how the morning would work I talked to the staff seperately and made sure they understood their roles and what was expected of them.




The general concept for the morning was this. There were a number of games set up such as: Football toss, Golf Shot, accuracy throw, bingo, and other games of skill. Each camper starts with 10 tickets and the goal is to build up more tickets from playing the games to use in the afternoon. Campers can play any game they want. My role in this time was to the play the part of 'Johnny Lucky'. I wore a sweet vest and walked around with a deck of cards. I had two roles, most importantly just roaming around and making sure everything was copacetic. I also would entertain kids in line by giving them a chance to pick certain cards for tickets; teh jack of hearts was always worth the most, it's my favorite card. The kids were into it and it left them wanting more so it was good.


We had a regular lunch then rest hour. The campers came back at 230. Wig and I teamed up to explain the afternoon to the campers and staff all at the same time. There would be some of the games from the morning along with some other things. The bigger stuff like jousting et cetera would be out for the kids to spend their tickets on. They also could enter different raffles. I also ran two scavenger hunts the kids could complete to earn tickets. One was based on things they could learn about camp in the area, the other was things about the staff that they had to find out.

The afternoon was fun but hectic with me overseeing the scavenger hunts and raffles. They were both very popular and the kids sometimes lacked patience. Still it wa was fun to see the kids succeed as well as see th entire day go on. It was popular to the very end. Towards the end some but not that many of the kids started losing interest. Some of the staff as well started to kind of check out as many had been doing the same thing for 2 hours. We probobly should have mixed it up. I worked for about an hour afterwards cleaning up the area then went to the field meal.

Field meals are meals where we eat primarly on the baseball field. We usually have them on special days. Unfortunatly they usually involve some form of Hot Dog which I detest. Tonight is was Bagel Dogs (gross). There was also some delicious turkey though, or as we claim it to be "Alaskan Humingbird". It is a tradition that I won't explain here but ask me about it sometime.

In the evening we had a 'circus' which was basically a talent show. It was a mix of talents, some stupid, some impressive, most entertaining as well as the raffle drawings and some skits. Wig ran it and it went well. I did the raffles as well as showing off some talents of mine (towel tossing, spining one plate on another, and spinning a 18inX36in sheet pan on my finger) as my friend Cheezy played 'The Entertainer" on the piano. It was good.

I finished the night handing out snacks in the division. It was a good day.

Joey
Recently Finished: Shadow of the Giant
Currently Reading: Clash on Kings and Comanche Moon
On Deck: The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness rules our lives.