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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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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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The first two weeks of camp have gone stupidly well.  So profoundly smooth that I waiting for a meteorite impact, Biblical-scale flood or the discovery of an burial ground to ruin the fun.  Normally, we spend a bunch time fixing stuff each week and with so few hiccups we’ve had this time to improve camp.  One commissioner proposed having more clocks in camp.  So, we made him the camp’s official time keeper and equipped him with a Spongebob Squarepants analog clock so he roam the camp as the Mr. Rogers version of Flavor Flav with equally byzantine usage rules.  Today, we had the first test of our time keeper.

Administrator: What time is it?
Commissioner: 10:35 AM.
Administrator: You’re not saying it right.
Commissioner: Sigh… Spongebob says it 10:35 AM.
Administrator: Thank you.

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The first two weeks of camp have gone stupidly well.  So profoundly smooth that I waiting for a meteorite impact, Biblical-scale flood or the discovery of an burial ground to ruin the fun.  Normally, we spend a bunch time fixing stuff each week and with so few hiccups we’ve had this time to improve camp.  One commissioner proposed having more clocks in camp.  So, we made him the camp’s official time keeper and equipped him with a Spongebob Squarepants analog clock so he roam the camp as the Mr. Rogers version of Flavor Flav with equally byzantine usage rules.  Today, we had the first test of our time keeper.

Administrator: What time is it?
Commissioner: 10:35 AM.
Administrator: You’re not saying it right.
Commissioner: Sigh… Spongebob says it 10:35 AM.
Administrator: Thank you.