And They Threw It Out The Window!

July 30 2008
-Wednesday-

Yet another morning beginning at 5:30 am! Just as I had hoped. I do so love the mornings there! I got dressed and went outside to another bright and sunny day! Of course being that it was shortly after sunrise, it wasn't exactly warm, but oh well. I took a walk out to Clover Field...It seemed so weird to be up at the field when it was completely empty with nobody else around...yet it was so beautiful. I looked up to the mountain that stood so high on the other side of Clover Field... It was covered in pine trees and there was a halo of light illuminating the very highest peak. This would be an incredible photograph! I thought to myself as I looked down to where my camera usually hung off a lanyard on my neck. Oh shoot, just my luck. I left my camera in the cabin. There was no point in running back to retrieve it. By the time I got there and back the lighting would have changed, not to mention I'd be running the risk of waking up my cabin mates, which I suspected that they probably wouldn't have appreciated. I stared back up at the mountain a little longer before heading back down to the basket ball court.

Once more I ran across Bo, sitting in the same place as the day before writing in his journal. We talked a little and then looked around to see if we could find a basket ball...but had no luck. Not long after, several of the other guys emerged from their cabins and came up to the basket ball court as well. Zak, Nick...and I think Eric and a couple others too. I pulled out the collapsible Frisbee that Nick had given me the day before and we all played catch for a while. That was fun, although I learned the hard way nylon Frisbees were never meant to bounce on concrete. It got rather worn out in a hurry :-( It turned out that Nick had quite a few of these though and let me have another one. Yay! But let’s just say I didn’t play Frisbee on the concrete anymore after that.

Eventually we all got tired of playing catch and headed down to start off the first gutter ball game of the day. That didn’t last too long... Eric had won again and I was just about to have my turn to play him when Pastor Harris came down and informed us of a new rule that we weren’t allowed to play that game until after the wakeup call. *sigh* Oh well. I suppose there are some people in the camp who need more sleep than the rest of us.

Once breakfast was over we all headed off for cabin cleanup... Of course I helped out on my group's creativity a bit. I drew up a sign in my notebook that said "Cleanliness is Next to Godliness" which I had my stuffed dog holding up for the judges to see.

Then we had recreation and following that was chapel. Nick and I grabbed a seat together again...It turned out that I was sitting with all guys this morning! After the two of us sat down Zak joined us along with some other dudes from the cabin of the "Undecided's".

At lunch time later that day, we were all given sandwiches and ate outside at the picnic tables. I got a good laugh...Both from Zak's jokes and from the group of teens who decided to jam themselves onto a miniature picnic table! We had Clayton, Eric, Ben, Jessica, Raeshelle, Scott, and Peter all crammed onto the tiny eating space. Oh my! What a sight that was. We had a bit of action going on at my table too, what with the conflict between Nick and Joy, Laurel, & Zak. At times Zak & Laurel sounded like they wanted to slug the dude...Although I can't remember quite why.

Sometimes my life feels like a movie, and this week was one of those times... Happiness, music, conflict, friends, action and romance....Oh yeah. Not to mention valuable life lessons! Gotta love summer camp.

Anyway, after lunch we were all rounded up and headed to the parking lot where we were all assigned vans and travel partners. We're goin' on a hike! I couldn't have been happier about where I got placed- I got the big van with Pastor Harris at the wheel and Laurel, Zak, and Joy accompanying me in the back seat. Needless to say we had an awesome time.

When we got there we all divided up into hiking groups. I was in one of the medium ones, along with Nick. Him and I talked the whole time and Mr. Bates said that we must have the largest lung capacity of our entire group to be able to go on hiking those hills and talking a mile a minute all the way up. All in all it was a terrific trip up. The scenery was beautiful, the pace wasn’t too bad, and the conversation was fun. It wasn’t long before we reached our destination, which was this incredibly pretty waterfall. I got some good pictures of it, along with the surrounding area, and other campers.

About a half hour later or so, we all were to regroup and head back down the side of the mountain. Before we left, Nick decided to get a photo of him and I beside the water fall. I’d thought about having a copy of it on my camera too, but we were being called back over to the group so I didn’t have time. Once we got back over, I made a last minute decision to switch groups and join up with Laurel, Zak, and Joy who were in the slow group.

After we had traveled down the trail a ways, there came a walkie talkie call saying that there was a camper up ahead who had a twisted ankle and was waiting up for the slow group to come down so he could join. When we got there who did we find? None other than Nick DeRu. I wasn’t really surprised, I figured that he would probably find some way to join up in the group that I was in. He had tried to switch earlier, but they wouldn’t let him for some reason. So Zak got down and took a look at Nick's ankle and wrapped it up... Yep, Mr. Prepared is on the case! I swear, if there was any disaster to happen, Zak had something on him that would help. I guess it's true about boy scouts, they really are always prepared. Or at least this one sure seems to be. Anyhow, Nick seemed to be fine, although he swore his ankle hurt, him and everyone else made it down just fine. Once we got back to the end of the trail, we had a snack break and headed back to our vans for the ride back to camp.

After we got back everyone was given ice cream bars and two options to vote on- either do a sporting activity of some kind with Ruben, or have an hour to brainstorm with your cabin group about what to do for the skit contest of the upcoming day. Most everyone was tired out from the hike though, so when they did the show of hands almost everybody voted to work on the skits.

Amazingly, up until this point there hadn't been any mentioning of what we should do for a skit from my group, which was a rather drastic change from last year when we came up with our skit on the second day of camp and practiced it every spare minute that we had throughout the day. Really though, I'm glad that it happened like it did because it gave me more time to hang out with my friends who were in other cabin groups, which was something that I really didn't do much of last year.

We were all tired from the hike and rather brain dead, so for the first half hour most of the ideas we threw out to each other for skits were really lame. Like a veggie tales skit. Who'd want to do a skit where you can't use your hands, anyway? Some of our other ideas were a Survivor spoof or a spin off of Indiana Jones...what we finally decided to settle on was a skit about time travel. I liked the idea- especially because I was able to convince the girls to have a scene where I could use my light saber! Yeah, that was basically my focus...I didn't really care what the skit was, I just wanted to have a scene in whatever we did where I could have a light saber duel with somebody.

After our brainstorming session, we had another chapel. On the way from my cabin, I ran across Nick who asked if we were going to be taking up our "usual spot" as he put it. I agreed and then headed off to find my stuff, and Laurel & Joy. Once we got down to the chapel we sat down by the end and then on the other side several girls from my cabin came and joined us. For some weird reason my row was popular! By the time Nick got there, there was only one spot left in our pew, and Laurel and Joy made sure to scoot so that there wouldn't be room for one more. So he sat a row across from us. He looked pretty disappointed, and I felt kinda bad...although the two of them told me that was dumb and he was the last person I should be saying that about. But even so, I considered him one of my friends and I don't like shoving people off like that, even if everyone else says he's annoying.

Following chapel #2 was a bit of free time and then dinner. Ohhhh yeah. After a busy afternoon of hiking and skit planning and everything else, that was something that sounded really good. Then again, meal times were always really good. But of course no time beats free time here. As we stood in the line to the dinning hall, Joy and I looked across the row at Nick who was looking rather depressed still as he waited in line, leaning on the pair of crutches he'd found. Was the sprain really that bad? He made it down the mountain just fine...But whatever. After dinner was through, Joy, Laurel, and I were heading out and passed by him. Laurel was rather disgusted at his sad attempt at faking an injury and confronted him about it, as Joy and I stood back watching with wide eyes being halfway shocked that anybody would actually be that hard and upfront about the matter. Not long after though, he ditched the crutches. Apparently his ankle wasn't that bad off.

Later that night, we had one of my favorite Fun 'n Stuff activities- Silly Songs! It's so insanely goofy, but oh so much fun. Luckily my throat had enough crud in it to blot out the soreness from my cold, so I was able to sing as loud as anyone else. I couldn't remember the words to quite all the songs, but they were all fairly easy to pick up on so it didn't take me too long to get singing with the crowd. I even hopped up on stage with a few others to lead one of the songs-something I had really wanted to do. So me, Lindy, Lucy, Zak, Anna, and some others lead the group in singing "I Met a Bear". That was so hilarious...I very much wished I had gotten somebody to take up my video camera for me on that one. The song it's self is kind of funny, but what really made it awesome was the acting job done by Lindy and Zak. That was great, with Lindy trying to reach the highest branch of the "Tree". Eh, I guess the part of the tree fits him well- after all, Zak is the "Landmass", as the guys had nicknamed him.

I may not have been able to video the song that I did, but I did get several of the others. "The Second Story Window" was a fun one, although you could never hear on my recording what the other team was singing because my team was always whispering what nursery rhyme we'd sing when it was our turn again. I so love singing the chorus on that one though- the tune is great and the words are pretty funny. "...And the threw 'em out the window! The window, the window, the second story window! With a heave and a ho and a heafty throw and they threw 'em out the window!"

Another favorite of mine was the "Little Ford" song. On that one they called all of the guys up on stage to lead the song, which of course was quite comical. I am so glad to have that one on video! Well, I got most of it on video. Since the song repeats so much, I didn't get the whole thing because it's rather long and I didn't want to use up all of the space on my camera that night. Even so though, I got a good portion of it. Even Pastor Harris was up there for that song!

Oh, and one other one I cannot forget to mention that we did was "Fried Ham". Yeah, another incredibly repetitive song, but totally funny what with all the different accents on each verse! "Second verse same as the first. What accent do ya think is worse?" Of course they did the famous cowboy accent version, as well as some others, such as under water, and the best one I think I've heard yet - helium accent, which makes everyone sing it super-high pitched. That was great- especially with the fainting job performed by our camp comedian.

Anyway, after we sang our last silly song, everyone headed out to the kitchen for snacks. As we headed in I remembered Wednesday of last year's snack time...oh the fond memories! I had had such a blast sitting around the table playing spoons with everyone! Yeah, good times...playing the game, singing "If you're happy & ya know it" and pounding the table, laughing like mad even though I hadn't the faintest idea what we were all laughing at, constantly pausing the game to take photos.... Awesomeness. We didn't end up doing that this year though. But big game of spoons or not, we had fun 'n food together, thus [nearly] ending another great day of camp (but of course, we always had cabin devotions before our day was completely finished).


"Match in the gas tank, NO FORD!!!"