Camp is good

It’s been a very busy month. We’re starting our fourth session tomorrow, and things are going pretty well. I can’t say they’re going great, because there are always downs, but there are several ups, to balance it all out.

I mean sure, we had a lousy week at boating, with one kid clocking himself in the head with his own canoe paddle, and then another kid falling in the lake while trying to climb into a boat, and then the next day a counselor tipping a canoe over and clocking another camper in the head. That wasn’t a fun place to be, for me or my staff.

Over in Adventure, at the 55 foot tall Alpine tower, we found ourselves short staffed, so I ended up helping out all morning on Monday. No big deal as my schedule can handle it, but sadly, my sunblock could not, so I nursed a super secret sunburn for three days, which I called “dry skin.” Sunburn around here is a cardinal sin, so the few people who knew had to keep it quiet from the medical team. And then little bottles of sunblock with an SPF of about a million started randomly appearing on my golf cart and in my backpack. That was some entertainment.

Arts and crafts had a great week, though, because I got approval to buy a ton of blank leather bracelets, for our oldest campers to make. They hate arts & crafts, as a rule, but they liked doing the leather tooling, so I kept pleading for it. And the big boss came through, which should make for some fun times over there. We also got a new donation of about a million markers, which I’ll be regifting to another camp, because we just can’t use them before they dry up.

Things are rocking and rolling in sports and rec, now that we turfed the third counselor out to be a cabin counselor. She had a whole lot of drama which made session 1 and 2 a bunch of misery for her coworkers, and not much fun for me, either. By comparison, things were smooth sailing this week. And the kids had fun. Plus I got an email request asking what supplies we need donated for the Superdome, so I spent today coming up with a list that will cost several thousand dollars, but really give us some great gear.

On the downside, since I supervise the most counselors as the program director, I’ve been asked more than once to play the heavy with some of the cabin counselors, too, when their unit leaders can’t get the right behavior change. I hate those types of meetings. It gave me a bunch of anxiety.

Which led me to another type of anxiety I experienced for the first time this week. See, at the closing campfire each session, a professional company comes in and launches fireworks for the campers to enjoy. The normal pyrotechnician, or whatever they’re called, wasn’t here this week, and his back up guy was in place. The back up guy didn’t have quite the right timing, so the fireworks to me looked like a whole bunch of incoming fire and outgoing C-RAM rounds. And that’s when the shakes began. Stupid Iraq still bugs me almost a year later.

But camp is good. Yeah. Good.