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I can’t stand people drolly watching television but I have no qualms about plopping people around a fire in the cold with no other forms of communication besides talk.  Well…. there were a few other:

ENTER – My Brother

Apparently, since time immemorial by brother has taken to disposing of his beer bottles by throwing them onto the top of the trailers in the fire lot.  One scores a point by heaving a bottle onto the roof and having it stay there without falling.  Only two points were scored that evening.

A friend of mine had come up from Virginia and brought himself some whiskey.  He fell backwards off of the cinder block on which he was sitting and my brother sprung to action.
Ryan: You know what they do when they train a horse?
Guest: No.
Ryan: If you fall of, you get back on.
Guest: Ok.  I’d like a hand.
Ryan:  You get back onto that block, and kick it’s ass!

The end of evening, on my brother’s way out, he looked at my guest and said “You’ve tamed the block”.

I had far more food than I needed and re-discovered something I learned a while ago: When it’s cold out, people don’t like getting up and tend to eat less.  The exceptions to this were the hot dogs that we found legion ways to roast, marshmallows (but not any of the other s’more pieces) and interestingly enough Cheetos.

I look forward to having more.

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The last campfire I had was about seven years ago and while I was still working at RadioShack in the deep dark long long ago when the restricting resource was money over time.  Now things were reversed and I felt like I got a deal getting food for 20 people for under 100 dollars which I later compared to the bank-breaking $87 I spent way back then but loathed the hour I lost grabbing what I needed.

I set things up using a LED headlamp that didn’t exist in 2003 except as a bulky almost miner helmet.  I called my dad to see if I could throw rocks in his truck bed; a convenience I lacked in 2003.  As a final act, I took a picture of the arrangement as a reference using a camera whose technology would have been beyond bleeding edge then.

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The Friday of the Camporee was scheduled to include an instructional campfire.  Most kids don’t know how to assemble a skit from scratch nor how to make a bad one suck less, so Joe and I decided to show them.  We put together a collection of songs, games, and cheers (exactly zero of them, I hate cheers) but wanted a new skit.  I scoured the web for new materials and after checking at least two hundred links I found a single new run-on.

Two guys are throwing propane back and forth.  3rd guy comes by, asks what they’re doing.  Response?  Passing gas.

Hard to believe that a skit involving throwing a propane can near a fire was the only one I hadn’t seen.  This is why I entitled this section “Run-ons: Where funny goes to die”.

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Someone had the idea of getting some people together to try to record the early history of my TF2 team and record our first impressions of some things and I had a wonderful exchange.

Other Dude: So what was it like meeting FlameDemon?
Me: He was… gayer than I thought he’d be.
Other Dude: What’s that mean?
Me: I’d seen his facebook field and he seemed generic, but in person he had cultural calling cards like pink shoes, except in this case is was a faux hawk, capri pants and an Armani Exchange shirt.

I expressed my sentiment poorly and this got back to me quickly but through a bit of a filter.

Flamed: I know you were using it as a fake example, but I do have pink shoes.
Person 2: Flamed is mad you talked bad about his pink shoes.
Person 3: Why are you picking on men with pink shoes?