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Today was a task day where I had 12 things to do where I’d be happy if I finished six and wound up finishing four which is more than the three I had set as the “minimum to finish before sleep”. Life’s sometimes about managing expectations.

I baked nut-less banana nut muffins and edited enough photos that I’d only be slightly over a month behind. My dry-cleaning went undeposited, the floor was unvacuumed, and, to my probably future disgust, the kitty litter went unchanged. When the last happens, my free-thinking cat shits outside the box in a show of septic defiance.

While running on my treadmill I realized that I had completely missed the Webelos Weekend. I had no intention on running or providing program, but four the past four years that event had been my first weekend in October and now it had been covered in a pile of tasks including such quests as arranging a washing machine repair and buying new pants. Someone else spent a weekend showing children the joys of science and while I was glad it happened, I was saddened that it was not me.

We choose.

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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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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.