I ran a training this evening on parliamentary procedure for Ajapeu Lodge’s executive board. Â I went over the parts of a meeting, how minutes should be taken, and finally how to pass a motion with critical rules like “don’t let anyone talk twice until everyone’s talked once”. Â These rules were quickly ignored as adults leaped on top of kids and may have found ways to interrupt themselves, but one rule stuck: for the rest of the evening, in accordance with the “courtesy to the chair” section, the lodge chief, Theo, was addressed as “madam chair”.
Tag: ajapeu lodge
Back Home: Day 5 – Lodge Elections
OA weekend Sundays have three distinct of which the first is to wake up at a time before you ever should and be forced to be fully composed in front of children who’ve just gone through a possibly life changing experience. The combination of fatique, disorientation, and putting on an air of composure will probably be the closest I ever come to being hung over.
The second part is suffering through a 150 minute lodge meeting while the kids elect new lodge officers. Normally this takes a while, as it did this year but for an entirely novel reason: the Ajapeu #33 operating procedures require anyone elected to receive 1/2 the submitted votes, in the case of this not happening, the vote’s reheld with a 2 person run-off that should theoretically guarantee someone getting in. This time, an unusually large number of kids wrote in either “blank” or some non-sense name that even with only two people running, no one person got half the votes cast. The Lodge Adviser had exceptional coolness when faced with this and after the 3rd try, I think the kids got the gravity of the situation. Part and parcel with this are the election speeches, my favorites being those who simply shit talk their predecessor or those that fabricate facts. Lodge participation, brotherhood conversion, and event attendance is on the rise with the only real concern being that event prices haven’t kept up with costs yet each person wanted to make the lodge “more like it used to be”.
The final part is going home and simply faceplanting to recover from the weekend. I wanted to do this but my pillow, comforter, and even comfy shoes were located in Tucson. I’ll make up for this by simply staring blankly at the wall for two hours when I return to my Tucson host’s house.
While Playing Stick Wars
The lodge executive board meeting was… unexcited, so while the other advisers sprung to answer the questions no one asked, I sat back and decided to raise my high score in StickWars, the iPhone game where one attempts to kill stick figures. There were some cases where I could concentrate and others where I couldn’t:
Pledge – Couldn’t play (c’mon)
Chapter Reports – Could play
Discussion of Banquet – Could play
Discussion of Lodge Budget – Could play
Grit teeth while listening to kids flounder at making parliamentary procedures and literally have two seperate people telling the youth what to do: Couldn’t play
Interesting, by extension I can probably read while listening to the TV… except for “Bring Your Child To Work Day” on whatever C-SPAN’s covering.
2010 Ajapeu Lodge Family Banquet
The Lodge Banquet is rare among Scouting feasts as being a reasonable length of under two hours. Â After many successful years, the Lodge Banquet had become a victim of its own success and was to be choked with “dignitaries”, “award recipients”, “speakers” and other such drivel that drives one’s patience to ruin.
This year’s banquet had an unusual savior: A power outage. Â Not 5 minutes into the event, a tree near the dining hall fell and took out power just to that building. Â Being the Order of the Arrow candles were deployed in under 15 minutes and the event resumed. Â The 30 minute award presentation was cut down to 10 when the PowerPoint was removed and the shot to the head that would have been the chapter video competition was axed. Â Overall, the event had a certain charm to it as the generator hooked into the building allowed some sets of lights to go up for a minute, blow a breaker, and then go out again. Â I also had a chance to try ISO 12600 on my new camera which I’ve dubbed “21 MP cellphone camera” mode.
The peculiar lighting led to some interesting portraits.
[flickr album=72157623623086270 num=20 size=Thumbnail]