I'm a weather junkie

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I’ve been busy as hell. A well-meaning friend of mine pointed out that I might as well have fallen off the planet for all of the communicating I’ve been doing with the outside world. I assured her I was still on the planet, even though I live in a bubble.

No really, here at camp, we live in the bubble. That means we keep the outside world at bay for most of our staff and all of our campers. They’re here for barely 5 days, so they can survive a week without cell phones and I-pods. Me though, I step in and out of the bubble every day, because I live for the weather.

It’s my job to determine whether we’re on the regular schedule, a back up schedule, or the weather schedule. The weather schedule can be called because of thunder and lightning, but it can also be called because of a nasty heat index. And I must say, we’ve had some nasty indices, topping out in the 110’s, lately. As if that wasn’t enough to throw camp into a tizzy, we’ve had some thunderstorms come to visit lately.

And that’s when my cell phone and walkee-talkee blow up. I can’t communicate fast enough with the rest of camp to head off the phone calls and radio reports coming in at me. I usually burn through 2 radio batteries in the course of a day, and most of my cell phone. In a storm though, I can burn through all of that in under an hour, which leaves me a bit stunned. It’s a whole lot of program to rearrange, to keep 128 campers and at least that many staff safe and having fun.

The worst was last week. We had some outside guests coming into camp to do something special for the campers and a bad storm moved in during the afternoon. The entertainment counselor called me crying, because it was raining, and she needed it to stop. Yeah, I’ll get right on canceling that storm for you. I have the national weather service on speed dial, in my cell, which means I can check the weather, but I can’t cancel or change it, no matter how we’d all like to wish otherwise.

Anyway, after a couple hours of bad storms, and power outages, the weather cleared. We had dinner about 15 minutes late. And our special guests arrived.

Because the US Army’s Golden Knights came to play. They made a couple jumps into camp, thrilling the campers and staff alike. Sure, the humidity was at about 98%, and the temperature was around 112, but we spent the evening outside staring into the sky. The camp was miserable, because for the first thirty minutes of trying to breathe swamp water in place of air, no one knew what was happening, and then the first skydiver came down, flying the POW MIA flag under his canopy.

And then it was on.

The good news is that we’re in our 9^th week of camp. We only go to 10 sessions, which is at least 2 sessions too long, but we’re almost done. And when we’re done, after I take a week of vacation, I should get back to regular communication, I hope.