It's been a busy few weeks around here. I started this little episode two weeks ago, as we finished up a family weekend, and ended up surrounded by 800 motorcycles here at camp. I didn't get much farther than the vroom, vroom though, when I got a call on my day off telling me that the order from one of our esteemed arts & crafts donors had arrived, and that I had 6 pallets of supplies sitting at maintenance, with a forecast of rain in the coming days.

I have to tell you, six pallets of anything is huge. But it wasn't just those six pallets. I also got tagged to organize a volunteer crew who came to help get ready for the garage sale we had at camp this past weekend. Didn't know about them but that was another 6 pallets of supplies, in a different location. That was the day I was shuttling TV reporters down into camp, too, as a helicopter landed with some NASCAR peeps here to shake some hands. I imagine the list of people who have to hang up on their mom on the phone because of reporters and helicopters are few and far in between when it doesn't involve a natural disaster.

So I had some volunteers for 6 of the 12 pallets. And then I had 2 co-workers who busted their butts with me to get the arts & craft supplies into the craft building. The rest of the team... not so much. Everyone on the team did get together on Friday to help development set up all the stuff I'd previously helped organize for the garage sale fundraiser camp has. I've never seen so many die cast cars, of all sizes, in one place. And then the day of the garage sale, I fielded a million phone calls, like "how does the popcorn machine work?" and "do we have a hot dog costume?"

The machine works by heating up a kettle, to which you dump in corn and oil and let it do it's thing. And no, we don't have a hot dog costume. I can hook you up with a Slim Jim costume, a pizza slice, a milk shake, or an order of fries, but we don't have a hot dog. "Are you sure?" I'm positive. "Hey, how does the popcorn machine work? They just asked me to make some and I don't know how." Turn it on, let it heat up, dump in the seeds, dump in the oil, repeat as needed. "How do we play music in the ... (pick one) dining hall, the bowling alley, the theater or over the jumbo tron?" I'm pretty sure I worked that day, even though I was off.

This week started off calm by comparison. I had a busy Monday, with an unproductive trip to the eye doctor. (They were busy, and people who had appointments after me complained so they got to go first.) I rescheduled. And then a group was coming through from some foundation I've never heard of, for some sort of tour or something, that no one cared to deal with, so it got handed to me.

And that's when angels began to sing and the sun beamed down on me, making up for all the crap I deal with here, on a regular basis. You see, I'm the "go to" person for just about everyone, even though there are people above, below and beside me who should be handling these issues... but they don't, because they can't. So I get crap from all sides to deal with, usually on the fly. And I can deal with it. But. Not my job.

Back to the angels though.... the group that came through wanted to know about what we do here (not an uncommon question). And how we do it. And what they should do. Somewhere in the 3 hours we spent together, I got invited out to learn to ski with them. And I think I got offered a job several times, too. It seems they pay their staff in 1 day what we pay in a week. And they're in the freaking Colorado Rockies!

I'll be brushing off the resume, writing a letter or two, and a strategic plan on how I can benefit their organization. Because the best thing of all is that they are combining care for all my military troops and their families, in addition to kids with special needs. The military side is something I started writing back when I was in Iraq, seeing a need even then. And here it is, landing in my lap again, asking for my help.

I told you the angels sang.

The Road to Hell

Man, I haven't written in forever. I've had some good intentions, but they're just paving the road to hell right about now. I figure my personal road is a ten lane superhighway at this point. It's a toss up though, whether the traffic is flying along at 80 miles and hour or snarled in gridlock that will last for the rest of my life on that road.
Anyway, camp ended in August, and I think I did a pretty good job this summer. I didn't have the urge to kill anyone, which is saying something, since I was surrounded by kids who were holding on to the last of their teenage behaviors with a death grip. More importantly than not killing anyone though, is that the kids had fun. Every time I saw them, the campers were having fun. I'm not so sure I did, but I figure that's just because I'm one of the responsible people who are busy fretting over all the details. And around here, there are a lot of details.
After camp I dashed home to Texas for a bit, which made me realize that I miss living in the suburbs. I know, I know. How can you possibly miss living in the suburbs? But I do, because there, I have easy access to all kinds of crap, whether it's a store that sells sunglasses, or Thai food I don't have to drive three hours to find. And a broadway play. Even if I don't go to all that stuff, I miss the access to it like hell. Round about these parts, here in Central North Cackalackee, I can't even find a used book store. Thank God for the internet is all I can say on that one.
And holy crap. I'm watching a movie, in which my boyfriend's son has a few scenes as an extra or something, and dannnnnnnnnnnnng, do they look alike. At least we know what Sam I Am will look like when he's older, and even if I am biased, I think he'll be pretty good looking. Wonder if those strong family genes are going to carry on to the little Sam that's on the way. Not sure the planet can handle three of them at the same time, but we'll find out soon enough.
Even with the hurricane, I bet my favorite Tex Mex dive is still open and going strong. Heck, they were probably only closed for a day or two, before they were back to dishing up some great food to fill hungry bellies. The family came through okay, and everyone is bunking at my parent's house, which is sure to be interesting. I'm kind of glad I'm not there for that one, no lie. I'll be home for Thanksgiving. That's plenty close.
So yeah, I'm going to pack it in and go for a drive on that superhighway to hell of mine rather than blathering on about a thousand other things. It's about the only road I can go for a drive on, with the price of gas right now.

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.

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.

It's raining, it's pouring... okay it's not, but it might!

Mmm, that’s better. Things are down to a manageable level of chaos around here, and I think I’m doing pretty well. Not perfect, of course, because I am far from perfect, but I’m getting things done when I say I will. I’m not leaving anyone twisting in the wind, and I’m getting people trained to do what they need to do this summer.

Today was the perfect day to train them all on weather procedures. I’ve mentioned to them in the past that I’m the person who will make the weather call. But today we had a pretty good chance of some bad thunderstorms in the afternoon as a cold front blew in. So when we were all gathered in the theater this morning, I was center stage with the microphone, going over some weather procedures.

They’re pretty much common sense, but there’s nothing common about camp. I was telling them that if they hear thunder or spot lightning, that they should call it in to me immediately. At my extension. Which is forwarded to my cell phone. Which lead to the perfect opportunity for a trio of counselors to sing the song they’d made up about my phone number.

Keira’s desk phonnnnnnnnnne,

Keira’s desk phonnnnnnnnnne,

2-0-3-4, Keira’s desk phonnnnne.

Apparently you’re in, you know “innnn” when they make up a song about you. Granted it’s just my phone number, but still, I’ve been told that it means I’m not only liked, I’m well liked.

Which is a good thing because tonight when I had to go out in the rain to three different areas and send all the counselors up the hill, I was pretty stern. I wasn’t mean, I was just authoritative, so that they’d know to truck their butts up the hill immediately, since I didn’t want them off the hill to begin with, but I gave in when they started whining.

But yeah. A song. Heh. And the entire camp sang it, twice.

90 Miles an Hour

Holy Batman, have I been running at 90 miles an hour. I got back from Texas on the same day that a group of camp counselors arrived here, and it’s been nonstop ever since. It was pretty nonstop before I left, actually, too, but this is verging on ridiculous.

I can’t remember when exactly it happened, but I’d say around the third day of camp, one of the staff got sick. Hell, it was my roommate who got sick, and the camp nurse called me while I was up in Greensboro at Wal-Mart to ask me to be a good roommate and bring her some ginger ale. Seems the roommate was throwing up big time.

Seems the roommate was also patient X. And while she probably wasn’t the one who actually contaminated everyone, in the end over 25 people got sick over the next three days. We had a serious case of the Norovirus in camp, and it had everyone blowing chunks, tossing their cookies and spewing violently for hours on end.

I had the good fortune to avoid the illness, but I was one of 5 healthy people who kept the camp running throughout it all. It’s a fact that I did 3 people’s jobs, including my own, and kept us on track. It seems like it was a month ago now, though, because when we finally got everyone healthy, it was time for my 30 program counselors to arrive, and I had to immediately see to their training.

Two days after that, the rest of the counselors arrived, and it was time to start their training. And now I’m rapidly rewriting the activity schedule to try and satisfy the departments who need a specific schedule, while keeping the rest of the camp on track. That’s 19 program areas for each kid to visit throughout 3 days, and that ain’t easy.

Since it’s not challenging enough, I’ve got a cranky lifeguard who is way too big for her britches trying to railroad me into making the schedule changes on her agenda. So I had to derail her little train a bit and take away the boating counselors, because I think running the pool will be more than enough for her this summer. Actually, right now I’m not even sure she’s competent to do that, but a trial by fire will answer that soon enough.

Once camp gets started in June, things should normalize a bit. When they do, I’ll try to write more because it is a really spectacular place. There’s just no time at all, as I’m pulling 17 hour days regularly. But I live in hope that it will settle down soon.

And they let her be a lifeguard?

So I’m back in Houston this week to teach a water safety instructor class. I have to teach that course every 2 years, minimum, in order to stay certified as an instructor trainer. Since getting that IT rating was such a pain in the butt that I make certain I teach, and having spent a year and a half in Iraq, it’s time right now, this instant, to teach.

I packed up my office and brought a ton of work with me, because the start of camp is next Saturday. Well, staff training starts next Saturday, but still, I have to have everything ironed out and on the schedule by then, even though the first campers won’t arrive until the 1^st of June. Anyway, I caught a plane back to Houston, my dad picked me up at the airport, and then we met my mom a couple blocks away, where I all but threw him out of the car and headed across town to teach less than an hour later. Awesome parents, to say the least.

Friday night’s course went well and my friend Tweetie Bird came to teach with me. The WSI course is pretty involved and has a ton of lecture to do, so we like tag teaming it, for our own sake. It’s also great to see her again, since she’s here and I’m there, most of the time.

Saturday morning we’re back at the pool and had just put our class in the water for the first time. It’s an indoor pool and they were jumping up and down complaining the water was cold while I pretty much gave them a chance to settle down. We started swimming a few practice lengths of strokes they needed help on, and while I was down toward the deep end on deck, mind you, I noticed the lifeguard instructor who was teaching another class out of the corner of my eye.

Becky was giving the pool the hairy eyeball, which meant something was up with her student who was in the water. Then, about a half second later, I’m giving Becky the hairy eyeball as she enters the water. I make the split second decision to head over to her, stripping off the jacket I was wearing and entering the pool, too, as the back up lifeguard. It seems that she had a little lost Dory in her class, who managed to surface under the bulkhead, swim through the tiniest of crevices, and become caught inside. She could breath, don’t fret, but she wasn’t getting out of there on her own.

Long story short is that it took three lifeguards, a whole lot of steady, smooth talking to calm Dory down, and about ten minutes to get her out of the bulkhead and then out of the pool. Little lost Dory didn’t have a scratch on her, but she was quite hysterical for a bit, which I can relate to. I left it to Becky to calm her down, and I swam back to my class once the chaos was over.

Did I mention I was in cargo shorts, with big pockets, a t-shirt and my tennis shoes? That sucked big time, but otherwise everything went well. And heck, in today’s session, I stayed dry all day.

Oh, and Dory told me, “I almost died again this morning! I was coming off the freeway and I knew the light would be green so I didn’t stop… And it was red!”

Ugh.