Rubbing Buddha for good luck? Really?!

Greaaaaaaaaaaaaat. It’s now been reported that masturbation can help prevent prostate cancer. Like guys needed an excuse to do that more often.

And no, sex doesn’t have the same effect.

Stupid Australian researchers…

They just made it more difficult for any woman who’s still single and interested in men, of course, to convince a man to settle down. What is the allure of sex when the guy can spank the monkey in the name of cancer prevention?

Also, does that mean they’ll spend a little less time working out at the gym, reducing the effects too many steroids and supplements have on their bodies, in order to have enough, uhm, we’ll call it “energy” to do their prevention, uhm, we’ll call that a “workout” too?

It’s going to be tough to tell what this latest study means for the world, but those crazy Aussies have guaranteed that guys between the ages of 20 and 50 years old, which is the prime dating range for everyone with more brain cells than hormones, will be busy committing assault with a friendly weapon….

Fish hooks galore!

It was a good week this week. No one else quit, we didn’t have 4 outside groups visiting camp in 3 hours, and no one pulled the fire alarm. I’m not sure I ever mentioned that, but a few weeks back, a young camper wondered what the fire alarm handle was all about. Then there was a lost camper drill at 2 am the same weekend, which turned into 4 teenagers sneaking around, so yeah, this week was easy by comparison.

I’m pushing hard to get ahead on the things to do before summer camp starts. Every day though, summer camp comes one day closer, and every day, a dozen new little details land on my desk that need attention right now. A friend of mine reminded me the other day though, that I’m good at organizing chaos, so I’m really not sweating it.

Texas is calling my name, too. I’ll be home to teach for a week at the beginning of May. Trying to shoehorn that in was a little stressful, but it all came together yesterday and it won’t cost me all of my vacation time, either. That’s a huge relief because the boyfriend will be home in November, and I’d like to get to spend more than a day with him. And now, it’ll work.

Life is good. Even though my hand is sore from squeezing pliers on the all the fish hooks I smooshed, and I have mud all over my shoes from helping at the barn during the thunderstorms today, life is good. But I won’t say no if anyone wants me to mail them about 10,000 fish hooks to debarb before summer…

Somebody order a pizza

Earlier this week a co-worker of mine quit. She was a really tough person to work with and had pretty much caused most of my misery since I arrived here, so I wasn’t sad to see her go. I was, however, frustrated with all the tasks she had left undone. It’s inevitable when people quit though, that the work they claim to have been doing is actually not being done.

So anyway, her departure, plus several staff vacations, left our program team really short for the family weekend we just had. And now I’m up in the office using the real internet for a few minutes, while wearing my boyfriend’s sweatshirt and his way too big fuzzy Crocs. I’m going to get the files I need, post this story, and then head out to find some place with a drive through, because no way in heck am I cooking dinner tonight. Cooking dinner would involve grocery shopping, you see, and that’s not going to happen.

It’s not that I have anything against groceries, or cooking, but it was a whopper of a weekend. We had 32 amazing families in camp for the physical disabilities weekend. Aside from some wheelchairs and walkers, though, the smiles are all the same. It was pirate weekend, too, so Friday night saw all of us dressed up. I was sporting a lovely hot pink pirate beard, too, which our videographer got on camera. And then the video editors made sure to put it into the weekend DVD everyone left with. I think I’ll be Pirate Pink Beard forevermore at this point. Heheh.

We played games, danced, bowled, fished, rode horses, made pirate loot bags, snot, slime, and painted wooden letters that spelled out our names. We painted the miniature ponies fun colors and took the llamas for walks. We went after a hole in one on the putt putt course as fast as we could and got lost in the maze after we climbed the tree house. We climbed in and out of race cars, practiced our pit stop tire changes and raced on the video simulators. We painted our hair funny colors, did our nails and our make up too. We ate cotton candy, ice cream and popcorn. We built model rockets and launched them later that afternoon. We looked at amazing Model A cars that came to visit. We watched a Mad Scientist make a gummy bear burst into flames. We watched the fabulous Hot Dog Daddy O’s put on a rocking good show, and then we put on our own rocking good show, too.

Weekends are busy around here. But they are awesome. And even though there were only 3 of us on staff handling things, with all the amazing volunteers we had here, we never missed a step. I’m excited because summer will be more of this amazing pace. There will be more staff to help, certainly, but then again there will be more work to do. I know, though, that it’s going to be awesome. I’m sure I’ll get overly tired, overwhelmed, excited, happy, sad, frustrated, thrilled and a thousand things in between. I’ll also get bitten by bugs because that’s mandatory at camp. It’s going to be a fun ride from here on out.

I’ll try to get a picture off the video, so you can see the pink beard, but no promises on when that will happen. Meanwhile, just think of it as reaaaaaaaallly bright.

Camp camp camp

There have been a lot of small changes going on this week at work, and now I’m pretty much heading toward “overwhelmed.” I’m not overwhelmed yet, but I can see the potential to head there rapidly. So instead of doing the stack of work I brought home this weekend, I made some down time for me.

Sure I still had some telephone interviews to do, because they’re unavoidable right now. And I had to go to 2 fabric stores on Saturday morning to find material to make costumes out of for summer. But other than that, I ignored the pressing need to rewrite the woodshop tool use policy, as well as to do a calendaring of all the hundreds of tasks which need done between now and the beginning of May.

Today is Monday though, and while the program team is technically “off” I’m going to try and sketch out everything so I can get with our volunteer recruiter and see when it might be good to schedule some hands in to help. The arts and crafts building needs a serious bit of love from some women’s group full of organizational ability. The theater needs a new set designed, by some people who are good at that sort of thing. The costume closes also need a serious overhaul, because a lot of the things in there are tattered and torn. The gym equipment needs sorted and the Fab shop needs a complete overhaul.

I know it can all be done. I know it WILL all be done. But right now, staring at the wrong end of the list, it’s a bit daunting. Because I also have two weekends at home in Texas to teach, a family weekend here at camp, and several staff training days to fit in this month. And the interviews. Always the interviews.

Each person we interview gets a phone call to set up a telephone interview. Then we read the application and autobiographical essay, which takes about twenty minutes. Then we call them for the interview, which takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. Then the answers from that interview are reviewed, which takes another half hour or so, and a second interview is scheduled. That one only takes an hour, and then those answers are reviewed. If the candidate is up to scratch, then a third interview, which is about ten to fifteen minutes long, is scheduled and an offer is extended. Hiring someone around here is exhausting. But it is how we get the best staff possible for camp.

So a lot to do today. And my first interview of the day is now, so I’d better get to dialing…

Matt Maupin

I spent a long time in Iraq, and now it’s tough for me to read the news some days. I still have loved ones and friends who are my military family over there. And so when I saw the headlines saying that an Ohio soldier’s remains were identified, it was one of those times when I couldn’t click on the link.

It’s for the same reason I only watch happy movies and TV shows right now, I guess. I’ve had a whole lot of negative going on, including “boyfriend in Iraq” stuff, so reading the news there can be pretty grim on a personal level.

So when I finally did click on the link and found that it was Matt Maupin’s remains, I rocked back on my heels.

You see, back in Iraq, I ran a Matt Maupin computer lab, so the troops could contact home. We had three of them on base at Anaconda, and they were the most popular places there. And they were all possible, because Matt’s parents donated the computers themselves.

That’s right. In the middle of worrying over their son who was missing in action, the Maupins pulled together nearly 90 desktop computers and monitors and shipped them to Iraq. And the troops used the hell out of those machines.

Every monitor displayed Matt’s picture on the backdrop. Every computer lab bore his name. Every soldier who logged on remembered “gone but not forgotten.”

I can’t imagine that will change, either.

Peace be with you, Matt Maupin, and with your family as well.

Drama Schrama

I know, I know. I haven’t written, again. I swear I’m going to get back into the habit of it, though, eventually. Maybe.

The thing is, about a month ago, I flew home to Texas for a quick vacation. That was great, and we had some big fun. I’d been struggling a little bit at work, due to some personality issues, and so going home was just the break I needed. Plus Mom and I went shopping for some wicked cool costumes for me, I got my hair done, and hugged on the nieces a bit. There’s never enough time with the nieces, unfortunately, because they’re as busy as I am.

After that weekend, I came back to work recharged and struggling a bit less. I know I’m no picnic to work with sometimes, but I also know I wasn’t the one initiating the problems. I certainly might have overreacted to them a bit, but not to the extremes I was accused of by the other parties. It was a vicious circle, but the circle was lessening because I realized the drama just wasn’t something I needed to engage in. I decided to set a goal to communicate less, because I have a wicked bad habit of explaining things to the death. It’s something that will help me here at work, and probably in life.

Anyway, that next week back at work was good, better than it had been, because the week before I left, I wasn’t sure I was coming back from Texas. It was as if there were big attitude changes from more than just me, though, and it made it easy to have fun. I don’t expect work to be fun constantly. That’s just not going to happen. But I don’t expect to be miserable either. Sure, I was tired of being on the phone, because I was conducting three to nine telephone interviews a day for potential summer staff, but that wasn’t misery. That was part of the dirty deeds which have to be done to get through camp.

So I interviewed a lot, and then we had a family weekend. Then I got the call in the early part of the week about Uncle Tim, and it was a scramble to get to Pittsburgh and back. When I came back on Saturday, we were in the middle of a family weekend, so I immediately went to work after the seven hour drive giving me a 17 hour day. And then, because I’m still a “new hire” and don’t have any vacation or sick time yet, I had to put in ten and twelve hour days Sunday through Wednesday. Because on Thursday, I was cutting out at lunch time to fly home for Easter.

But right before I left, there was an announcement made that my boss was leaving the camp. Not necessarily by choice, either, and that he’d be gone a week later. So sure, bosses come and go all the time, and it makes some chaos. In the camping industry, though, it’s a problem when the camp director is leaving two months before the summer camp staff start to arrive. It’s a problem when the summer camp staff expect to be working under the person who hires them, only to find the rug pulled out from under their feet before they arrive. So there was a ton of drama there, as we all rallied together and counseled them that they come to camp for the magic, not any one particular person.

There were a great many other mis-steps that happened along the way this past month. Some of them were huge, some were small. Every single one of them though, has brought me to the point where I committed to work through the summer, to make it the best possible summer here. And then I’ll re-evaluate the situation and see if being here is still a healthy thing for me.

For now though, I see a great summer ahead, for all the kids. A lot of work for myself, but nothing I can’t handle. Because the potential of this place is amazing. The potential in myself isn’t too bad, either.

In remembrance

I haven’t written in a while and I was going to be all over it today, as I had the day off. And then I got a phone call from home telling me that my favorite uncle passed away. So now I’m scrambling to clear my schedule and get to Pittsburgh tomorrow. It’s all worked out, though, and I’ll be there to say goodbye to Big Tim.

He was a great man. Life wasn’t always kind to him, and he didn’t always make the best choices back in the day, but he continued to grow, to improve and to correct his mistakes. I only knew him later in his life, after he got over the rocky years, and he was a great uncle to me.

When I was skydiving, he was thrilled, and would tell me about when he tested HALO rigs for the Army. He had a lot of broken bones back then, but it never stopped his love of skydiving.

When I went to Iraq and had some attitude problems come toward me from the troops and co-workers, he told me how to handle them. Usually with a straight forward “f-off” and then continuing with whatever task I was doing, now that I think about it. But having someone say that was a huge support.

When he’d visit Texas with my aunt, he’d dance with the dog teaching her to do a little shuffle step she’d only do with him. And he’d steal cigarette breaks out on the back porch, pretending to hide them from his wife, who pretended to not see what he was doing. His kids would do the same song and dance with my aunt, with everyone having fun pretending to not do or see what was going on.

Big Tim retired from teaching this winter, and left us suddenly, peacefully, last night. There was no sign anything was wrong, no indicator he was ill. The big man upstairs just decided he needed someone to argue politics with, though, and called him home to Heaven a bit earlier than we’d all have liked.

You will be missed Uncle Tim.

Love,
Keira