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I’ve done the OSR Leader Guide for the last five years and each year the criticism grows subtler and more ridiculous:

2006: Please add text.  Pictures of the master schedule and of Scouts doing activities are nice but actual text would take a lot of the guess work out. (Fake)
2007: Please drop the frames.  It makes navigation difficult sometimes and hard to send people links.
2008: Please make the master schedule clickable, so someone can click on a department and go straight to that department’s schedule.
2009: Please add option for on-the-fly printing of each page. The printable versions aren’t always updated.
2010: Please replace all sans serif fonts with serif fonts to make viewing easier in the printed version.

I can’t think of another case where someone was so willing to inconvenience everyone else and harm their viewing experience so he could improve his printing experience.  People like this should replace magicians as the inhabitants of the 7th bolgia of Dante’s Inferno.

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The Pinewood Derby is this Sunday and a leader contacted me about changing his participation line-up:

Him: I have two kids dropping, is that a problem?
Me: Nope, we’ll just change the pairings.
Him:  Ok, can I pick up their car, patch, and certificate on Sunday then?
Me: Sure, except the certificate.
Him: Why not the certificate?
Me: It’s for participating in the Pinewood Derby.
Him: So?  They won at the pack level.
Me: Yes, but they never participated in the actual district race, so they shouldn’t get a certificate for something they didn’t do.
Him: But they deserve a certificate.
Me: *realizing that logic is of no use* How about this, if they show up to race, I’ll give them a certificate ?
Him: Sounds goods.

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The Lodge Banquet is rare among Scouting feasts as being a reasonable length of under two hours.  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.  Not 5 minutes into the event, a tree near the dining hall fell and took out power just to that building.  Being the Order of the Arrow candles were deployed in under 15 minutes and the event resumed.  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.  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.  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]

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The 5D Mark II has some wonderful features or at least I assume so as I have no idea how to use them.   I excreted a sizable chunk of masonry on finding that most of my lenses didn’t work.  What was  I left with?  My 70-200mm zoom lens.   I went to the troop 5 banquet which as it entered its four hour I dubbed the Scoutathalon and babied my photogun until the Eagle Scout ceremony began.  When the lights dimmed and the event started everyone started taking pictures.  On camera phones, with point and shoots, by running down the aisle to get adequate zoom.  The camera+lens I had probably weighed more than every other device in the room and the shutter noise crowded out the artificial din of mock-shutters.  Heads turned, conversations stopped.  I won.

There was a problem though, getting shots of anything within 10 feet of me.  After the main event someone requested I take pictures of the recipients and I kept running to a problem as people would walk between myself at the kids because I had to be 30 feet away from them.  I lost.

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First: A pretty and oversaturated view south of the bridge at Tyler State Park

February 20, 2010-2-KlondikePanos

I think chromatic aberration is nicely magnified by Lightroom’s vibrancy function.

The Boy Scout event had nine sleds with 49 Scouts using 15 stations.  The two most innovative were Ravine Crossing and Hatchet Throwing.

Ravine Crossing involved Scouts moving their sled across a fake gully using ropes and such but the station operator was not impressed.  “The name of the station is Ravine Crossing.  There will be a ravine, and kids will cross it.”  I laughed but later saw the swath of destruction he had wrought.

February 20, 2010-151-KlondikeDerby

The actual event is at least 100 feet from the actual trail and more than one tree was… adjusted.

The sled race was simply spectacular.  Normally, the winning team lifts their sled and simply guns the entire course which is a soccer field.  10 inches of wet snow with the adhesive power of gorilla glue turned the course into a forced march through quicksand.  Instead of celebrating after victory the winning team literally collapsed and made snow people-grabbing-their-calves-gripping-the-Charlie-Horse.

February 20, 2010-250-KlondikeDerby

Rest of Photos

[flickr album=72157623489453810 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

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I visited Tyler today to do my pre-Klondike walkthrough.  Only one of the parking lots was and the Webelos area was replaced with a glacier.  The killer was probably the snow trail depth which varied from 18″ to well over 36″.  I would have taken a picture of me disappearing into a drift due to a mis-step but it was… cold.  So, here’s a placeholder:

February 12, 2010-12-Tylerinsnow

After talking with the park supervisor we decided that holding the event would be impractical and unsafe so I made two stitched together panos.  The first is the cornfield at the top of the Nature Trail:

February 12, 2010-34-Tylerinsnow The second is taken from the main bridge.  I recommend you blow it up as much as your computer can manage.  I think it came out well and should have a copy of it all my wall at work on Tuesday.

February 12, 2010-2-Tylerinsnowpano I performed no white-balance adjust which may make it appear bluer than some people like.

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I understand the utter irony of canceling a Klondike Derby due to inclement weather.  This arctic-themed event seems like it would be greatly enhanced by the 17 inches of snow received but as I was placing emails and calls about the event, I found that unit leaders were under one or more of the following impressions:

  • Kids arrive via teleportation, without having to traverse unplowed roads.
  • All parents will deliver their children as signed-up for the good of the sled and ignore the motherly instinct to protect.
  • Every sled is delivered by a 4×4 Land Rover.
  • All activities that depend on access to the ground can occur on top of a foot of snow and will require no clearing.
  • The facilities at Tyler State Park are all heated meaning that the pavilion, bathrooms, and parking areas would require no snow removal to make usable.
  • An emergency rescue team lives in the campfire area, available to pluck from the river children who didn’t realize the bridge was 10 feet behind them.

Now I have another week to kill before I begin my last minute preparations.  I love Scouting.

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Putting together the paper Bucktail is the most annoying single OA task I do during the year.  I receive insufficient content and have to start fabricating expanding on other people’s work and checking factual accuracy out the wazoo.  We blow hundreds of dollars in postage, paper, and printing and I have only so many pieces of useless Scout/OA trivia in me to align spaces.  My most recent problem was that I had to kill a page on the back of a form.  I won’t put useful content there so, in a bolt of inspiration, I went through old Bucktails and found a word find from yesteryear.  Everything was fine except that the name of the then lodge adviser was a target.  Luckily, the current lodge adviser’s name has the same number of letters so I just swapped the two… until I realized that some of the crossing words may break, so I had to solve the word search to check.  I hope we never issue a lodge history cryptogram.

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One district held their roundtable today and their theme was identical to one I did two months ago. Their presenters were covering for a missing person and didn’t quite fill the time. I asked to comment and 20 minutes later I finished stating the fruits of my previous research and waited for comments. Leaders kept raising their hands and commenting prefacing it with “like Terry said” to drive home points I had brought up, which was fine. Except that even after we switched topics away from winter camping leaders were still saying “like Terry said” first about things ranging from unit operations to their Klondike Derby. Does the phrase confer magical powers of factiness, if so, I need to get in on it.

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The Scout professional that oversees lower/middle Bucks’ program has grown in oratory over his years in the area.  We had a somewhat quiet start with he using few works but recently his passion for Scouting has expanded.  Tonight he made a passionate statement on his feelings of Scouting but something didn’t quite come out right:

Youth lead the program and unit leaders enable the youth but those of you here today have chosen to server other units in additional to their own.  Many of you do things that most Scouts will never notice but will still be affected by which leads to changes in the lives of our youth.  Ever time a child is touched in Scouting, parent’s take notice.

They do indeed.