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The dawn came early as I saw a battalion of cross-legged people move about the event field trying to find out why the bathroom door was locked.  The lush that gave me the the storage key hadn’t disabled the timer so no one could pee until 8 AM.  A mother told me that this wasn’t a problem and went on to talk about her outdoor bathroom practices using the phrase “pop a squat” at least five times and this was more my punishment for not thoroughly reviewing my needs with the park before hand so much as the crush of people searching for a place for their son to tinkle in a park with over 400 wooded acres.  The local Hess station probably saw a lot of visitors.

The closing ceremony was at 8:00 AM and at 7:40 a man approached:

Him: Can I have the completion certificates for my unit?
Me: I’m giving them out at the closing ceremony in 20 minutes after the Scouts’ Own Service.
Him: Oh, we’re not staying for that.
Me: I guess you’re not going to complete the weekend then.

He frowned and hurried his kids to his car.  I think he was the same adult that thought I was paid.

I brought everything home and here were my spoils:

  • 15 lbs of penne pasta
  • A box of Frosted Flakes
  • 120 eye droppers
  • 3 gallons of open fruit juice
  • A pair of prescription sunglasses, a pair of prescription non-sunglasses, a albuterol nebulizer, and a webelos neckerchief slide

I like the last the most, as my lost and found for the weekend contained five entries of “Webelos Neckerchief Slide” along with “shirt” (no additional detail given).

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I met Dawn at 8:10 at Sam’s to do food shopping; we chose that time instead of 8:00 as we wanted to sleep in.  Shopping was easy, a fact that Dawn attributed to there being no Scouting professional present so every question of “A or B” was answered with “the better one, we’re worth it”.  I quickly racked up $800 in groceries and when I found that they only accepted debit I had to log into my ING account via my phone to move the cash to the correct place.

OfficeMax was out of the toner cartridges I needed only having the $150 high capacity versions.  I yelled in my head, bought the cartridges with the intent of buying replacements online and returning those.  Printing was done and I found my dad removing the non-return valves from the rocket rigs.  He said he was trying to reduce resistance, I said it was going to just force water into the base, he said he was going to put the return valves back in.

I arrived at 12:30, about 45 minutes later than I wanted and the parking lot already had about 40 cards in it.  Registration continued for a little over an hour and we started at about 2:00 with the Mentos+Diet Cherry Pepsi rocket.  The following conversation happened about six times:

Parent: Do you use diet because of the aspertame doing something?
Me: No, sucralose would do the same thing as would regular.  Diet isn’t sticky.
Parent: Does the cherry add anything?
Me: It’s what I had in my house.

The rotations were uneventful and the 10 minute break for a snack was appreciated.  The next evening activity was my science demonstration of which the magnus opus was making little clouds using dry ice, water, and soap.  I made a few dozen softball-sized bubbles and we tried putting them on different surfaces to see what would happen.  They figured out that temperature was unimportant and that texture and material was more important and I was quite proud.  This faded when kids started popping the bubbles by licking them where they then observed that “CO2 tastes like soap”.  Little Einsteins.

The final learning moment involved the cardboard oven pizzas, where a foil-lined boxed served as an oven.  After several boxes caught fire we had to issue the reminder “do not put the charcoal in the oven until it’s no longer flaming”, then all worked well.  The day was done and no one died.

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I visited one of the troops for which I commission this evening and was asked to sit on a board of review for a Scout going for Tenderfoot.  I started with my standard “which superpower would you rather have: unlimited desserts for personal consumption or the ability to get a good seat.” as with most people under 15, he chose the dessert option.  My follow-up question was “do you have any examples of using something you learned in Scouting in the rest of your life?”

Kid:  Yes, I’ve used first aid a lot.
Me: Can you be more specific?
Kid:  It’s good to know how to apply a big bandage one-handed like after you cut yourself.
Me: When did this happen?
Kid:  A few times at summer camp.
Me: How about using a skill you learned in Scouting outside of Scouting?
Kid:  *silence* Can’t think of anything.

The BSA publishes statistics on how many Scouts use their skills to save a life, I always figured a good number of those were due to Scouting events.  Really seems like they’re stacking the deck.

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One station at the Webelos Weekend involves launching water-filled soda bottles with bicycle pumps and the devices to do such, I thought, had been lost.  I have a specific area to my attic which stores Scout activity stuff and found it barren.  I asked my father if he would be willing to build more and he looked at me strangely saying “sure, but I don’t think we need to”.  He walked me outside and showed me where they were which was by our retention wall under several inches of dirt, sediment and multi-foot long pieces of ivy.  They had sat for at  most six months but looked like they were under years of growth.  Weird.

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I was asked to come to a fundraiser event to run an auction whose auctioneer was unavailable.  I don’t drink so I didn’t feel bad not paying to be there and spent about an hour taking notes in the item, coming up with mediocre jokes, and determining minimum bids and bid increments.  The auction was about to start when the formerly unavailable auctioneer arrived and took the reigns, I was told he was ‘very good’ so I just noted bids.

Once the auction started I was underwhelmed by his performance as he read off of boxes, mispronounced words and made cheap auction jokes but then I found out why he was “good”.  During the auctioning of a wine party the bidding was slow so he doubled the offering, when that didn’t do the trick he increased it again by fifty percent and then offered to match the offer for anyone who matched the bid.  So “good auctioneer” apparently means “able to arbitrarily increase the offerings”.

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An assumption I make is that repetition will bring simplicity to doing Scout events.  It used to take me five hours to make two cheese cakes and it now runs me about 3.5 or so.  I used to take a day to set up a new computer but I can now do it in an afternoon.  Planning a Scout event used to take me about two weeks of evenings and four days but now I can do one in two weeks of evenings and four days.

I don’t feel like there’s any sort of feature creep in that I’m adding program to fill the available time and I should have theoretical time savings from already having most of the documents I need.  The weeks leading up to an event cause a well-documented cycle of anxiety where I feel bad for not doing anything which destroys my inertia to do anything.  This could sound like a bad thing but my inner humunculus enjoys watching what I’ll do to avoid making progress on my intended event.  I’ve replaced my bed, planned out 10 months of Roundtable meetings, updated every part of the district web page I could get my hands on and made my first to dip back into the world of selling on eBay.

I think at some basal level there’s such thing as ‘conservation of anxiety’ which is both terrifying… and probably bull crap.  I guess the give away will be if I start painting Gundam figurines this time next year or some other time sink.

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Every OA auction I do comes with a standard boat of personal terrors as, while I do research on each item with the assistance of some long-memoried fellows I still have a largely extemporaneous style that can theoretically get me into trouble.  I’m terrified of a Freudian slip or two words coming too close together and forming an ethnic slur and a dedicated team of braincells scan for such things.  A second set of fears is picking a bad minimum bid. $3 is cheap, $5 is normal, $8 is special, $20 is expensive/established price and I refuse to reduce the starting price once announced.  If I miss, I miss.

Bids were sluggish so I moved to a popular item, a grab mug.  I raised it stating the opening bid at $5.   Only one person bid and it sold for $5.  Historically, this means nothing as grab mugs were once sold at a fixed price of $3 consisting of a $1 mug and two or three $0.50 to $1.00 patches, but I’m somewhat proud of getting $12-$18 for these so $5 represented a crisis of confidence.  I was a bit shaken but moved on eventually returning to another mug.  This time, I did exactly what I did last time but mentioned that the mug was rare in that it had a blue fleur-de-lis but was a Boy Scout mug.  Hands shot up and I was redeemed.

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I stopped by Tamanend Park to pick up a usage form for the Webelos Weekend.  Many Scout organizations use the park but, in the park’s head, it seemed like there was only one.

Me: Hi, ma’am.  I’m Terry with Playwicki District and I was told to come by and fill out a usage form.
Secretary: Oh, Jerry!  We’re sorry that you canceled your event, what can we do for you?
Me: I’m Terry from Playwicki, not Jerry and my event is still very much on.
Secretary: You want to do a new event?  Sure, one second. Paul! Jerry wants to use the park again!
Paul: Great!  What about your next event?
Secretary: He’s canceling it!
Me: No, I’m holding my event, and my name is Terry.  I’m from Playwicki, he’s from Lenape.
Paul: So you’ve moved to Playwicki?  Makes sense since you can’t get people for your events.  When would you like to reschedule for?
At this point, I’m terrified of my weekend somehow accidentally being canceled.
Me: Look at the time, I need to run, is there any other way I can make a new reservation?
Secretary: Yes, call the township office.  They can help you.

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I was at a Scout meeting today being hosted by an adult leader who turned out be an excellent entertainer.  As the meeting progressed, new munchies were brought out every 45 minutes or so and after 3 hours I was in the fork of a dilemma.  The next item up looked like pepperoni, crackers, and water melon slices but I didn’t really want to stay another 45 minutes talking about a troop’s difficulty packing from summer camp.  Salvation came when someone brought up the aims and methods of Scouting, a topic that I could easily drown an evening with and before I knew it we received the watermelon and pepperoni as well as grapes and cheese.

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Serving as a unit commissioner is one of the easiest jobs in Scouting.  I visit a unit once or twice a month to make sure no one’s dead or dying and provide periodic assistance.  One of these semi-trials is visiting a unit with a special needs Scout that’s taken a particular liking to me.  I was asked occupy this Scout while the rest of the troop did CPR training and after listening to his nonsensical stories cluttered by the words coming out not quite in the right order he got quiet.

Him: Have you ever thought of running track?
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Some schools offer a track, it can help cure disease.
Me: Well, running track can be good for your health.  Why do you ask?
Him: You look like you’ve been melting.  I think it could help.