done.

Winding down

It is week six. That means we are beyond the point where we have found our pace to run at. We are so used to the pace, we don't even realize we are running. But we do know we want to stop.



Mmmmmmmm, week six.


We built a fort today. It's made out of milk crates and giant palates we use for tent floors. We have something like 216 crates for the walls, three palates for the floor (one for a porch) and two for the ceiling. And two chairs. And two mattresses. With a nice view in front. We need a camo blanket or something for the back so people eventually (a week and 5 days left) forget it's there.


PS I have to poop.

Oh dear lord

There are things on camp that I love doing. Hiking. Swimming. Canoing. Gravy. Cleaning up a giant barrel of water which has been vomitted into, then left for a week. Or two. And there may have been a piece of shit or two. Plus some trash. And flies.
Fortunately, the smell was totally bearable. Seriously.
If you can call vomit, gravy, poop, fly poop, and poop all mixed into a soup that had turned black bearable.
Which you can't. By the by.
Anyway, we slowly moved it to a ditch (spilling on ourselves, eliciting giggles from the crowd of onlookers and gags from Colin and I) and then put a trash bag on top of the barrel to use as a filter to catch the trash when we dumped it over.
The smell didn't improve when we poured it out. It just spread out.
Seven hours later, we still have the smell on our hands. And by we, I mean me because I'm not a little girl who washes his hands/arms forty times.


Good story.

Camp has made me a man

I really love my job a lot of the time, because it allows me to do all sorts of cool, useful things I never did at home. Such as:
-fix toilets
-troubleshoot plumbing in general
-drive a standard
-operate a chainsaw
-replace a tire (which I could do, but this just reassured me that I can)
-really basic electrical work

And I'm sure there's other stuff. But that's what comes to mind. This summer, I am a man.

Exhausted and Sick

Chinese food is the plan for the evening, assuming I can stay below the radar. Which shouldn't be too hard.
Two interesting climbing tower stories:
Yesterday I was on top encouraging kids to the top. A scout, clearly terrified of heights, had reached the top. Generally, that's when they get lowered to the ground. His dad, the scoutmaster, of course knew better than that. So he yelled at him to climb up. Once on top of the tower, the scout curled into a ball and began to cry. After fifteen minutes of this, I finally got him to sit up and look at me. But then he grabbed onto my arms and wouldn't let go. So another fifteen minutes later, Les (previously described) the climbing director, climbed up and hooked himself onto the kid. The kid's name was Andrew by the way. Les hooked Andrew to his harness, and pretty much jumped off the wall, pulling Andrew behind him. Andrew screamed until he was halfway down the wall and realized he was moving at about an inch an hour.

Story two happened today at the tower with my SALT guys. Nathan, a bigger guy, probably around 225 and 5'6", was on the line I was belaying. I looked down for a minute to get the sun's glare out of my eyes and suddenly Nathan yelled, "falling," which indicated he was falling. I locked the rope off but the rope has about eight feet of stretch and so he still fell that distance, the entire time I watched in horror hoping he would stop as I pulled with all my might on the rope. He stopped and eventually made it up that side, and down the other on a fireman's rappel line.


Ta-dah!

Man, where on Earth is Eddie

So I can now totally rock a standard. I spent all afternoon driving the other camp truck, since mine (Kevin, my boss's) has a blown solenoid or something along those lines. This one is a standard and he's all 'come on you're driving.' Apart from one notable embarrassing scene where I stalled about eight times in front of a scoutmaster/five staffers, I was tearing it up. And in a good sense.

I'm really hoping for rain tonight. I sort of just want to go in to town (San Marcos) and laze around. But if we don't get rain, I can just do that tomorrow. So really what's the difference. Not much, I know.

Aaaaaaand...that's about it. Pretty boring week. The best kind.

No interesting title:(

Today was eerily calm. Sundays are traditionally the hardest days for commissioners. Troops arrive at 1:30, bringing with them an onslaught of problems and 'opportunities.' We spend all day trying to get everyone in proper campsites, with the gear they need, and in a general sense of satisfaction.

But today was notably blasé. I had essentially one problem, where a troop wanted to expand into the campsite next to theirs to have more tents. They could. And that was it. Totally lame.

There are two College Station troops here this week, which is incredibly abnormal. One who traditionally comes to camp, and my home troop who comes every other year. Its been a pretty long time since I was active with the troop, so I only know a very select group of the adults and boys who they brought.

And that's it...

OD

So not only do we work like 12 hour days here, we also have chores, called OD-standing for Officer of the Day. I saw 'we' in a relative sense, because now that I'm on Service I do OD in a different sense (read: I'm constantly doing it). How it's structured is each weekday, a group has a different task to do. These are a) 6AM Ice Pull (see entry two prior) and morning flags, b) River Camp dinner service (pick up trash/mop/babysit), c)Ironwheel Mesa dining hall service (serve, but you have to go all the way over the to Mesa, which is punishment itself), d) clean staff latrines, e) clean staff lounge/10 PM ice pull.

Traditionally, all these jobs are done poorly and half-assedly, if at all. Unless you're on Eddies crew, then he rides you to the bone. Well tomorrow is our National 'Visitation' (read: Inspection) from the National Boy Scouts of America something or other, so we realized all this stuff needs to be done for serious. As a result, we had OD on 'roids tonight. This included: pressure washing the dining hall, cleaning the staff lounge to such a degree that we had to lock it afterward so it will never again get dirty, and hyper-cleaning the latrines. The latter was my job. If I didn't have more common sense, I would now eat off the latrines. We cleaned all the drains (pretty much never been done), I fixed three sinks which previously worked really poorly, and there was a lot of awesome Pinesol-ing. Now it's time to go do laundry at 10:45 PM. Thanks camp!! And gig'em.

Rain

It rained today. Weird. Cause it's El Rancho Cima. And it doesn't really normally rain here.

But it poured most of the day. What fun?


My class size dramatically decreased and it was only the guys I wanted to see. So that was good.



Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand... I have ice pull tonight. I'll let Colin fill you in on the fun that was overdone OD.

Ice Pull/Trash Run/Slop Run

Most loved of duties (hehheh, duty), Ice Pull happens at 6 in the morning and 10 at night. Basically, we take ice blocks out of big metal containers made to slice your toes off. Then we fill them up with water, and stick them in giant containers filled with poisonous chemicals that cause stuff to freeze quickly. Yay!

Trash run and slop run happen together. You wait around the dining hall until the end of dinner. Then you get all the trash and load it into the back of a big truck (lovingly called a one-ton). If you still have room (you rarely don't), you load the buckets filled with the food nobody ate onto the back. You proceed down the hill in the truck to pick up the trash from the troops in a fenced in area (which is never cleaned, therefore smells like weeks of garbage) and then go to the trash compacter which looks like a dumpster, but shoves all the wonderfully sticky and wet and disgustingly heavy trash bags into a giant rectangular prism. We then take the "slop" filled buckets to the wild boar trap and throw all the gravy, toast, spaghetti, breaded chicken breasts, gravy, mashed potatoes, baked beans, gravy, salad, and gravy into the pit of disgusting-ness. In the course of all of this, you get covered in the mysterious substance that seems to coat the trash bags, gravy, slop, gravy, trash, gravy, and the occasional substance you can't quite identify but is probably gravy.


I didn't have to do trash/slop run today.





Yay.

Colin is the whiner

Reasons why today was awesome:

-My host troop is an LDS troop. So I don't have to deal with them.
-I put on blue-bead (indicates swimming ability) bracelets instead of working hard.
-I got 3/4s of Colin's banana pudding ice cream (everything Colin said about it is true, and it's more amazing even than those boo-yah-achieving comments.
-I purchased guess who: marvel heroes edition. badass.
-During the leader's meeting, I threw sticks at all of my bosses, and they replied in kind and fun ensued until scary head ranger Wes poked me with a big stick for 5 minutes and talked about my sister.
-I had a fantastic, honeydew, orange, strawberry smoothie for desert in san marcos.
-My mom learned herself how to text message so she could simultaneously yell the message "call your dad" to my sister and i at the same time.
-I wished my dad a happy father's day.
-Colin had a miserable day.

Bad things that happened today:

-Ice coolers used for making ice for campers froze over so we have to defrost them.
-I have to wake up in less than 6 hours to pull that ice.


Next post will be about ice pull. And will be done in a timely manner. Thanks, bye.

Goodness, we are terrible bloggers

Things about today that made me a sad panda:

-Ocean's Thirteen was a waste of 7.50. Don't act so surprised.
-I woke up because, surprise surprise, there were cicadas all over the inside of the tent.
-The climbing director is AWOL.
-We get an email this morning (!!!) that a troop arriving this afternoon (!!!) needs to be moved into another campsite. As a result. I have to help set up 7 tents.
-A troop tells us they are bringing their own tents. They do not.
-A troop does not tell us they are bringing their own tents. They do.
-A troop requests an extra tent so each adult can have his own.
-This same troop decides to bring no cooking supplies (propane, pots/pans, cleaning). Apparently this is my problem.
-A troop in campsite 6, a quite lovely campsite, tells me that last year they reserved campsite 10. Apparently, this is my problem.
-We move them to campsite 10. The reason we didn't initially put them there is, of course, there aren't enough tents. We have to set up 6 more. The troop watches us work.
-Every single one of our campsites greater than 7 (8-11), are mis-numbered. This would be no problem, except the rangers didn't get this memo, so put troops in the wrong (actually right) numbered campsites. Confusion ensues.

Things about today that I enjoyed:
-Blue Bell's Banana Pudding Ice Cream. Exactly like it sounds. With vanilla wafers.

Les Guillams

I have decided to give a description of one of our camp's "Mascots." His name is Les. Short for Leslie. He enjoys introducing himself as nameles and making jokes about "more is Les." He is 45ish and has been living in some form of homelessness for the two years I've known him.

Last summer, he lived out of a Uhaul truck he bought and in a staff tent. There was no telling what was in the Uhaul truck. And he wouldn't let us see it, so putting two and two together (burnt out brain + locked cargo), I deduced either lots of alcohol or some sort of meth lab. This past year since the Uhaul bit the dust on some stretch of 35, he has been living out of a tent in staff site, paying the bills and fixing his Mom's house up with the money he makes as a ranger and off-season climbing instructor.

His ability to ignore things is phenomenal. He teaches BSA's Leave No Trace program to all the scouters and is adamant about it and living it. However, he tends to not care what sort of processed food, shampoo, etc. etc. he uses. His concern for the environment seems to be only for the environment he lives directly in: El Rancho Cima (and anywhere else he might currently be).

Because of his left-leaning opinions and the fact that he doesn't hold it back, he has gained disapproval/hatred/general dirty looks from most of the staffers. He is also insanely terrible at socializing. So being stuck in a truck with him (or worse, a glorified go-cart he is driving around the ruined backtrails), is always an interesting experience filled with learning that you never wanted to do.

Oh, yeah. His hair. Carrot orange, with white streaks throughout and thinning to bald in the front. His beard is the same make-up and up until yesterday, made him look like a male orangutan with the giant orange cheeks on either side. But he's shaved it and he looks less insane than he did (or is, not sure which).

I'm sure I missed something. We'll just have to wait and see what it was.

Regularly Scheduled Programming

First off, I'd like to say that all those previous posts' fonts are outlandishly too large. This is so much more manageable.

Here's the thing about operating a camp essentially entirely outdoors. Rain ruins everything. Most of the morning classes are taught under pavilions, so the kids can deal with having to walk in the rain to get Merit Badges, but after that we have afternoon and evening program, both of which cannot operate in the rain. Tonight was the first test of this.

Thursday night program is called 'Meadow Madness,' where the entire camp hikes about a mile to this awesome, giant clearing and we shoot black powder rifles and brand stuff and serve homemade root beer and cobbler and have a dandy experience. From there the first year campers, Eddie's kids, and the kids taking the Wilderness Survival or Camping Merit Badges hike out further and sleep out under the stars. This is all well and good fun on a clear night.

About 6:45 (Meadows starts at 7), we started noticing the sky was getting really nappy. Unfortunately, camp competence works at about half speed from everyone elses. So although pretty much every scout on camp realized that it was way too dark and ominous to have any sort of dandy time, staff prepares regardless. Myself, the service crew, and assorted staffers pile into the Service Mobile and head downhill (staff lives uphill, campers/program is downhill) to prepare. We got all of our water coolers/ice, kickballs, branding irons, and whatnot and were all hyped up and ready to go.

/*A Side Note
Remember how in cartoons, a character would always step on a rake and it would flip up and hit them in the face (particularly Sideshow Bob)? It happened to me today during all this meadows stuff. Exactly the way you imagine it. Warn your children. Tell the world my story. */

So we split off, half of the people and the gear go to the meadows, the rest of us (myself+loyal fans) go back downhill to square away some food related things. We get down there, and the big boss, plus one of the lesser bosses (flow chart to follow someday) are down conferencing. The sky is pretty dark at this point. There's a lot of chatter on the camp radios about what we should do, and lo and behold we decide to call the meadows off. The threat of rain is far more powerful than the rain itself.

I head uphill, along with most of the staff. A game of football breaks out. No rain. Thirty minutes pass. Still no rain. A guitar emerges. Songs. Bonding. Dry climate. Then it comes. Five, ten minutes it sprinkles. Passes. Guitar comes back. A snare drum. Staff bonds. Campers are presumably bonding downhill. Good times were had by all. That's good program right there if you ask me.

So the result is thanks to a light shower following some scary looking clouds, we all got the night off, nobody got homemade root beer, nobody had/got to camp out under the stars, and much of the staff got to sing along to an acoustic guitar rendition of 'Hey Ya.'

Chunk deuce.

Time to go to bed.

The real first post

First let me describe to you how incredibly sweet this is. We have finagled our way into being able to use both Internet-ready computers in the same room. It is, in a word, fantastic. So two guys, two computers, two simultaneous posts or something like that. Ballin.

I think I'm supposed to first talk about all the other areas Eddie didn't hit upon before I actually go and do, you know, real blog things. What he described previously (minus the Trading Post) is what is referred to as 'program.' The majority of the staff works on Program. But. There is another world. This is the world of Service. The domain I now call home.
Service has a lot fewer disciplines than Program does. They are

Service Crew: Ice Pull, Meal Serving, QM, all other assigned duties.
Traditionally, Service Crew is a team of about five guys, lead by the aptly named Service Crew Leader. Unfortunately, summer 2007 is one characterized by staff shortages, so our crew is a Service Crew Leader and his one staff member. They spend a lot of time issuing gear in the Quartermaster (QM), making ice for general use, and being underappreciated.

Commissioners: Schmoozing, Being Exhausted, etc
The glue/lifeblood/essence of camp. Without commissioners, nothing gets done. They divide their time between talking to adult leaders to ensure that their week is going smoothly, dealing with the needs of staff members and campers, and dealing with any unforeseen problems that arise (plumbing explosion, brush to clear, no shower curtains). There are pretty much two of us. We need about four to operate well. Awesome! In the perfect world, all commissioners have vehicles. We don't.

Rangers: Things nobody else is allowed to do
Rangers are on a whole separate plane of existence from everyone else. Many of them work for the camp full-time (while the rest of us are seasonal). They do the stuff nobody can--run chainsaws, fix pipes, build showers. Also are allowed to be jerks because they're so much higher up than everyone else. All rangers have vehicles. Lucky.

One last big point of clarification. The big name of the camp El Rancho Cima. Cima operates three camps: Cockrell River Camp (CRC), Walter Scout Ranch Horseshoe Bend (HB), and Hammond Scout Camp (HSC). We never really see the HSC guys, because they're all high adventure-y and secluded. Eddie and I work for CRC which, confusingly enough, operates a mini camp inside of it Iron Wheel Mesa (IWM). More on the Mesa later. So essentially there are two camps, River and Horseshoe. They are bitter rivals. And etc. The moral of the story, if we talk about Cima, we work there. If we talk about River, we work there. If we talk about Horseshoe, we're referring to a group of cromagnon apes who operate a proximal, inferior camp.

Camp Summary

Because there will be so many references to camp's layout and to different areas of camp, I thought I'd give a brief run down.

Areas of Camp

Handicrafts: Basketry, Wood Carving, Indian Lore, Art, Pottery (sometimes), Leatherwork
This is the area where all the artsy crafty things are done, therefore it is often ridiculed due to its lack of masculinity in a camp filled with testosterone drenched adolescents.

"Blanco Blast": Requirements for early stages of rank advancements in preparation for the Eagle rank.
Previously called FCE (First Class Emphasis or First Camper's Experience), this area is for the younger scouts and where I have worked the previous two summers. Also 'lovingly' called "fucking children everywhere."

Aquatics: Swimming, Rowing, Canoing, Lifesaving, BSA Lifeguard, Instructional Swim
Run by an old man who talks funny so that it sounds a little like a duck is pronouncing "Aquatics," this area is down in and around the river. "Blanco Blast" sends their kids over for swimming periods making it one massive clusterfuck and causing one staffer to tell Colin and myself that "there are too many kids," a point we were already aware of.

Skills: Pioneering, Orienteering, Wilderness Survival, Emergency Preparedness, Camping
Where scouting skills learned in FCE/"Blanco Blast" are strengthened and brought to the next level. Or just halfassed and you learn that rope and logs don't quite make as strong of a tower as one might think.

Climbing: Climbing
40 foot tower.

Nature: Shitload of merit badges from the necessary (Environmental Science) to the useless (the rest)
Lots of merit badges, not enough competent counselors, and Ron Carmen. Ron Carmen, lovingly deemed "Hot Pants" for his exceedingly tight and short Scout Shorts. But he will be discussed in depth at some other time.

Shooting Sports: Rifle, Shotgun, Archery
JR, which doesn't stand for junior, is in charge. Lots of shooting, occasionally some fire too rapid for the law, and instructors putting guns to their heads to pose for cameras.

SALT: Communications, Public Speaking
Mine. Kinda boring. But not. But seriously. We cook sometimes. We walk sometimes. We sit around sometimes. The rest is hardcore awesomeness. With the occasional float trip or hike.



Thus concludes the summary of instructional areas. I do believe Colin will correct me in some places (some where I'm wrong, and some where I'm not) and add to the list with other areas of camp.

Now don't be a moosehead, a-hole, or boo-yah-abstainer.