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I set aside today to finish my woodbadge ticket as it is due tomorrow right before midnight.  My ticket items revolved around the merit badge program in Scouting and improving Scouts’ access to these tools.  You can see my efforts at https://www.suburbanadventure.com/woodbadge-ticket/ or http://ifinishedmyticketstopaskingaboutit.com/, the second I’ll probably let go of in a year.  Some notes:

  • I needed to kill space on the merit badge instructor information flyer so I added a QR code that leads to the council web page.  I think it looks keen and makes us look modern.  All the links are also bit.ly links so I can see if they’re are used.  So far: 0.
  • Putting together the video references for First Aid took a stupid amount of time, for instance, I found an awesome video on dealing with strokes that breaks out into a 3 minute ad in the middle.  Kids probably won’t like that.  Other videos presumed the viewer was a doctor, was in an ER, or was a naturopath.  I probably should have just recorded some from scratch.
  • For the last CIT World requirement, I couldn’t remember that that an Ambassador lives at an embassy, which is odd as I remembered the word earlier but in that it was a long requirement and I didn’t want to re-record it, I refer to it as “the ambassador’s place”, good job, Terry.
  • My ticket was approved with 10 hours to spare.  I finished Eagle with 45 minutes to spare.  I’m growing!

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17 months ago, I participated in Woodbadge course NE-V-134, an underwhelming training experience that, given the option, I would choose to not repeat and whose subsequent iterations I actively dissuade most Scouters from joining.  The final part of Woodbadge is to compose and complete a ticket consisting of a vision pertaining to your position in Scouting and five goals centered around it.  One has 18 months to complete the ticket and I’m in no hurry even if it means non-completion as I feel otherwise comfortable with the hours days I’ve spent doing Scouting stuff since the course.  At this point, completing the ticket would be largely to get people off my back about it as ticket completion is pursued by some staff members with a zeal that would impress most millenarian churches.  This weekend, 12 people asked me about my ticket but most in the tone that suggested that it was the Scouting equivalent of “how are the kids”.  A few, who a friend suggested I call the beaderati, chose a more aggressive stance of “why isn’t your ticket done” and “when are you going to complete your ticket”, both of which are beyond what I consider appropriate for Scouting and at minimum have built in assumptions that are foolish.

To address these concerns, I bought ifinishedmyticketstopaskingaboutit.com that I’ll probably get up and running next weekend should I have time to generate the content to populate it.  I’ll make up some business-sized cards on reasonable stock and hand them to those who ask a bit more doggedly than I consider proper.

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Each day, the group in charge of providing songs and such for the day would receive a set of large wood beads to be taken with them everywhere.  At the end of their tenure, the group would return the beads with some sort of modification.  The group before my group served attached a “weather” rock to the beads in the name of functionality, easily increasing the mass of the thing by a factor of 10.  I decided to one up them.  When we were asked to return the beads and explain our adornment, I drove a tent spike I’d attached to the beads into the ground and announced that to further enhance the functionality the piece I’d attached the field to it.  The bead owner accepted my adornment and instructed the next group to receive the beads to visit the field once every 15 minutes to make sure it didn’t get lonely.

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Getting last minute things for Woodbadge proved to generate several Walmart trips grabbing rainbow card stock, hot glue sticks, lamination pockets, tongs, and propane tanks.  Each time  I grabbed one or two gallon jugs of Light Hawaiian Punch each time.  I was unsure of how many I got until I put them all together and found that I had enough to fill a  medium fish tank.  I think I’ll just grab a 20 gallon tank and put a piece of hose and a pond chiller into it and call it a day.

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I experienced the world’s loudest hinge today.  It was part of the Presentation Project used for Woodbadge on Wood Fires.  I heard it opened outside and it was noisy, but when transported into the warm and enclosed environment of my room it became something else.  Closing the door sounded like the scream of the demon love-child of a harpy and a pterodactyl.  It blew out glass (hyperbole), it set off my neighbor’s dog (not hyperbole) and it caused screws on desk to rattle and jump (completely fabricated).  It was loud.

I was very relieved to find out our presentation would take place outside in the cold and we wouldn’t shatter the glasses of our audience.

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The degree to which Comic Sans has penetrated Woodbadge is nothing short of stunning.  Body text, banners, notes, and even our shirts are in Comic Sans.  The rest of the text of the event is done in that font where it looks like things are spelled with logs.  People are commenting about the font mix and I keep thinking “here I will start my rebellion”.

Fall at OSR included repeated volleys of shagbark hickory nuts that are capable of raising welts.  I find people’s prioritization in what they cover interesting: during one volley, everyone used their binders to cover their heads except for our Troop Guide who covered his junk.

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The evening of the first day of Woodbadge we played a game called “Who Me?” where players landed on colored spaces and could choose to answer questions to advance or not to stay in place.  There was  a spectrum of questions and I was blessed with the following:

  1. What is your biggest regret in life so far?
  2. Give an example of something you’ve failed to achieve that you thought you would have by now.
  3. What was your most embarrassing life moment?
  4. Give an example of a big mistake you made.
  5. Is there a personal tragedy that’s shaped who you are?

The person immediately to my left got:

  1. What’s your favorite color?
  2. Tell a story about something funny that’s happened to you.
  3. What animal most represents you?
  4. What’s your favorite food?
  5. Give an example of a TV show you like to watch.

The agony and the ecstasy…