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Seen in this week’s Leader Evals: “Most Scout Spirit – Terry in Ecology”.  Normally, this would be a good thing except I was only in camp 2 days this week and neither were in Ecology.  I spent most of my time sternly talking to people at the Magic Tournament or sternly talking to people during unit check in.  I’m starting to think that leaders have a mental list of staff members they like and list them regardless of the interactions they have that week.

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Watching the staff play the champions of the camp volleyball tournament is my reward to myself for volunteering.  I get to make color commentary against people who are vastly better at the game than I am and get to practice the pre-requisites of Snarkyjerkmanship merit badge.  Normally there is a good clutch of people to bask in the glory of my commentary but the crowd of spectators dispersed quickly and I was one of only three spectators.  The music normally piped over the loudspeakers provided by a YouTube queue had ended and someone said “play some jams”.  I took the mantle of DJ and found a channel I like that does rather good Bach fugues.  This  was booed even though I consider a good horn fugue to be good pick me up so I put together a Glenn Miller list (everyone loves 6-5000) but that was booed too.  I consigned myself that anyone who shouts down “In The Mood” has no taste and put on Alanis Morrisette’s cover of “My Humps” before walking away.

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Staff members are drawn to the Magic Tournament as the locus of nerd-life at camp and they’re usually quite willing to help me with the fantastically menial tasks that dominate preparing my collection for sale.  One particular staff member sprang to the opportunity to work with cards and I gave him the following directions:  Create piles containing 12 unique cards of each color, 10 unique artifacts and 15 multicolor cards.  Keep going until you run out of cards (he had a 5000 count box, which would take me almost a day to process).

I returned about 10 minutes later and he had make 12 piles each containing one card of each color, an artifact, and a multicolor card.  He made 10 of these piles and when I asked him what he did he responded “I did exactly what you said”.

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Sometimes my impulse to do something gets the better of me.

Dennis Curran: Terry, uh you got some, uh, hairs on your head.
Me: Yes, Denny, that’s where hair goes.
Dennis: No, they’re not the same length.  Do you think next time you could, uh, do something about that?
Me: Why wait for next time, we can do it now. Denny, get a knife.
Dennis: Why?
Me: You’re going to cut my hair.
Dennis: *With a serrated bread knife* This might hurt, uh.
Me: That’s loser talk.   Grab the hair, put the knife at the right height and start sawing.

The next minute or two can only be compared to someone with Parkinson’s carving a Tourettic turkey.  Next time I cut my hair, I’m going to be a lot more careful… to make sure Dennis Curran won’t be around for the few weeks it takes for the hairs to level out.

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Many badges in Scouting now require web access as either an explicit requirement (visit the American Society of Landscape Architects webpage for Landscape Architecture merit badge) or implicit requirement (Personal Management requires tracking certain stats about stocks and very few publications offer these) and this week the only web access in a kid accessible building had been cut off, literally, by a fallen tree.

I’ve thought camp should have another area for kids to get to computers so on Monday I put out some feelers and Sam Lodise responded that Arcadia University was sending some PCs for recycling.  I stopped by, grabbed them, and brought them to camp.  This triggered a conversation between myself and another staff member.

Him: Wow, how did you get those?
Me: I asked, nicely.  We’re a non-profit, a lot of people will give us more stuff than you most people think.
Him: I just wish we could get paperclips.
Me: Have you asked anyone for them?
Him: No, but don’t you think we need them.
Me: Well, we can either buy them or we can ask for them.
Him: It’s ok, we can get by without them.

Ages ago I did a staff training exercise on how to compose an apology.  Maybe “how to ask for something” needs to be added to that list.

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When I was a camp administrator, my most hated experiences all revolved around weather.  I could predict when I’d inspire the ire of coworkers, anticipate that I’d piss off two people a week, and make a cock-up in the Summer Times once every two weeks (Hosemanship Merit Badge) but weather, that bitch, or the threat of severe weather could bring program to screaming halt.  In the worst cases, a severe storm would get near camp on a night with a lot of program forcing us to evacuate people, hold them in large hot buildings for an hour or more, and then dismiss them after nothing happens while trying to reschedule program.  Leaders are indignant that we held them despite nothing having happened regardless of the fact that had the storm gone a slightly different route the camp would have taken it up the pooper in terms of damaged trees, downed power lines, and strong wind-driven rain; such is the nature of weather risk.

Today, the camp anticipated some severe weather and called the staff to the parade field to divvy up who would go where, warn units, and entertain the kids.  I instinctively got in line to get an assignment but then stepped back after reminding myself I was a volunteer.  Staff members were being sent to one of two builds and after the staff was dismissed I told the assigner “I’m going to make sure that the [now empty] leader lounge is safe.”  He replied with a knowing grin.  Joe Naylor was also volunteering that night so I even had help.  Joe and I very successfully protected the camp’s DVD collection from harm caused by the storm by sitting in a nicely cooled nearly empty building while bullshitting and eating potato chips.

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It’s been a few years since I did a merit badge in a classroom setting and arrived early to get the style of the department.There seems to be a critical point where familiarity with a subject matter becomes command of the material and the content goes from being taught to being revealed.  A good instructor has an almost electric excitement about what’s being instructed and in an ideal circumstance the kids are infected and learning flows; before this point instruction is a fight against boredom and confusion.  I watched two sessions roll by led by different instructors and was overwhelmed by the feeling that the instructors were kids playing grown up.  I wonder if I was like that when I was that age or if there’s something about Eagle Department content that makes everyone sound like a parent when they instruct about how the world works.  By and large kids take Eagle Department badges because they’re required for advancement which at its simplest is completing check boxes to get a piece of cloth that fulfills another check box for another piece of cloth but such reductionism only happens without the context of the exigency of the badge’s requirements.

With Personal Management, which misses its second word, financial, the badge has morphed into bludgeoning kids about the risks of debt without informing them of the absolute necessity of leverage to create a dynamic economy.  Innovation is taken as something that takes place “out there” in some sort of inaccessible wild west where bankers shoot interest rate adjustments at one another and borrowers are brave souls ready to undertake the manifold risks of losing someone else’s money.  The badge requires two essential precursor questions that it never answers:

  1. Why do we buy things?  To achieve something we value.
  2. What is the relationship between time and money?  Explaining why time is money is easy as that’s what some jobs seem to be.  Explaining the opposite is a bit trickier where we trade money for conveniences, vacation, and other niceties that allow us the ability to pursue our values.

If I can get those two points across I’ll be happy, except that they can’t be done to the exclusion of the actual requirements.  Subsuming the BSA requirements for “Terry’s requirements” would be somewhere between rogue pedagogy and arrogance that I’d rather avoid but I think I have my first tweak in creating a merit badge futures market.  One requirement goes over the basics of how stocks work but there’s no familiarity with having kids invest fake money in a stock market where they have no expertise so instead kids will buy merit badges at auction that the camp offers and try to get a portfolio where by the end of the week they have the badges with the most completions.  Each day, I’ll reveal a new week worth of data from a previous year to add to the badge holder’s total and the best performing portfolio managers will be showered with praise.  I need to get some data.

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Volunteering at a well-staffed facility is simply splendid.  At any point, and nearly for any reason, I can reasonably stand out say “I’m leaving” flip someone off (if I have no plans to return) and then drive home to sort Magic cards and drink a diet coke.  Today, for my first formal day of volunteerdom I thought I was going to help fill out buddy tags at a medical recheck site and maybe answer a paperwork question or two.  Instead my assignment was to run a med recheck site.  This is a bit more than I expected but I take it as a mark of confidence.

Setup was prompt and kids started streaming in with their medicals.  My highlights:

Me: We can’t give you a swim tag because you don’t list a date for your physical.  Do you know when you say your doctor?
Kid 1: Yes, it was either September 20th or May 17th.
Me: Ok, do you have a parent in camp?
Kid 1: Maybe, I hope not.

Me:  I can’t give your son his buddy tags without seeing the 2nd page of his medical.
Parent: What’s on it?
Me: The OK from a doctor that your son is healthy enough to be at camp.
Parent: What do you need that for?

Kid 2: Should I take my buddy tags?
Me: Yep, your form’s fine.
Kid 2: Damn.

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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.

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Staying in Totem felt both homey and odd as normally I stay there because I lacked the basic camping gear to stay elsewhere which I rectified to complete woodbadge last year.  Now, I had the more respectable excuse that I owned the appropriate gear and that I’d even recently stayed in genuine national parks but said gear was in Tucson… and I had the blog to prove it.

My work seems lazy during OA weekends, I usually sleep through breakfast and then tool around a bit and see what odd things I need to do before the patch auction.  This time, I was asked to up with an entirely fake copy of the Bucktail (the lodge newsletter).  I’m quite proud of the list of fabricated facts:

  • Mark was the only gospel apostle to not get Eagle but helped Luke get Brotherhood.
  • Tohickon is the Lenape term for “place to dispose of bodies”.
  • The insulation in Totem Lodge is made entirely of Triscuits.
  • As a prank in 1975, Ockanickon Scout Reservation was sold on Craiglist in exchange for 8 beaver pelts and an antique flax wheel.
  • The Science Center’s basement contains a capstan operated by Ordeal candidates which powers the xenon space laser used to calibrate the camp’s telescopes.
  • The camp’s totem poles are actually ancient Indian cell phone antennas.
  • Bill Mischke is challenged to a duel on average 1.12 times a summer camp season.
  • Ranger Dave Smith is a three-time New York Times crossword puzzle champion.
  • The diesel engine was invented and perfected in what is now the Handicraft Lodge.

The full fake document should be available shortly.

In the OA, besides generating fake content, I do little besides running patch auctions.  Tonight’s auction went frighteningly well with a reasonable start, reasonable end, no cases of me accidentally insulting someone’s sexuality or cursing, and a good selection of items.  I celebrated with a slice of re-frozen cheesecake which I thought was the cause of my insomnia but it turned out to be an observation my subconscious had noted that my active faculties hadn’t: I sold the 2004 NOAC two-piece for $40.

Friends don't let friends pay $40 for this patch.

This patch debutted at $8 for the two pieces and is a simply hideous patch.  The top makes no sense without the bottom, the deer looks like he’s taking a whiz behind the tree, the reference is 10 years late, and using “Brothers” twice is jarring to the ear.  Eight dollars to forty dollars, that’s 61% interest compounded annually…  I disgust me.